After the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007, severe fire sales of assets in the financial sector are accompanied by a rise in the volatility of asset returns in the non-financial firms. To account for their co-movements, I develop a model that highlights the interaction between the financial health of the banking sector and the volatility of asset returns. The novel feature of the model is...

We establish several new findings on the relation between open interest in commodity markets and asset returns. High commodity market activity, as measured by high open-interest growth, predicts high commodity returns and low bond returns. Openinterest growth is a more powerful and robust predictor of commodity returns than other known predictors such as the short rate, the yield spread, the ba...

BACKGROUND Universal health coverage is high on national health agendas of many countries at the moment. Absence of financial hardship is a key component of universal health coverage and should be monitored regularly. However, relevant household survey data, which is traditionally needed for this analysis is not frequently collected in most countries and in some countries, has not been collecte...

Evaluation of default correlation is an important task in credit risk analysis. In many practical situations, it concerns the joint defaults of several correlated firms, the task that is reducible to a first passage time (FPT) problem. This task represents a great challenge for jump-diffusion processes (JDP), where except for very basic cases, there are no analytical solutions for such problems...

Two experiments are presented that compare alternative explanations to the coexistence of risk aversion and under-diversification (the tendency to focus on few stocks) in investment decisions. The participants were asked to select one of three assets under two feedback conditions. The returns from two assets were negatively correlated, and the third asset was equally weighted combination of the...

The volatilities and correlations of the returns on a set of assets, risk factors or interest rates are summarized in a covariance matrix. This matrix lies at the heart of risk and return analysis. It contains all the information necessary to estimate the volatility of a portfolio, to simulate correlated values for its risk factors, to diversify investments and to obtain efficient portfolios th...

In defined contribution (DC) pension schemes, the financial risk borne by the member occurs during the accumulation phase. To build up sufficient funds for retirement, scheme members invest their wealth in a portfolio of assets. This paper considers an optimal investment problem of a scheme member facing stochastic inflation under the Markowitz mean–variance criterion. Besides, we consider a mo...

In this paper, we consider the robust portfolio selection problem for an insurer in the sense of maximizing the exponential utility of his wealth. This special robust investment problem, where underwriting results and a risk-free asset are considered, differs from ordinary robust portfolio selection problems. The insurer has the option of investing in a risk-free asset and multiple risky assets...

In this paper, we consider the optimal asset allocation strategy of a definedcontribution pension scheme in both accumulation phase and decumulation phase. We model the optimal problem from the view of a defined-contribution pension plan member, who is aiming at maximizing his expected utility from consumptions and bequest. Assume that pension assets can be invested into three assets: cash, sto...