A century ago, life expectancy was roughly 40 years, hence saving for retirement was not an important economic issue. Nowadays, life expectancy exceeds 80 years in many countries, and one should expect to live and consume many years after retirement. Thus, optimizing investments and savings for retirement, with a long planned investment horizon, has become an issue of crucial importance.How should individuals invest for the long run? Does the optimal asset allocation between risky ...

This fully updated third edition is devoted to the analysis of various Stochastic Dominance (SD) decision rules. It discusses the pros and cons of each of the alternate SD rules, the application of these rules to various research areas like statistics, agriculture, medicine, measuring income inequality and the poverty level in various countries, and of course, to investment decision-making under uncertainty. The book features changes and additions to the various chapters, and also includes...

Microscopic Simulation (MS) uses a computer to represent and keep track of individual ("microscopic") elements in order to investigate complex systems which are analytically intractable. A methodology that was developed to solve physics problems, MS has been used to study the relation between microscopic behavior and macroscopic phenomena in systems ranging from those of atomic particles, to cars, animals, and even humans. In finance, MS can help explain, among other things, the effects of...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the mean-variance (M-V) rule, which are based on classic expected utility theory, have been heavily criticized theoretically and empirically. The advent of behavioral economics, prospect theory and other psychology-minded approaches in finance challenges the rational investor model from which CAPM and M-V derive. Haim Levy argues that the tension between the classic financial models and behavioral economics approaches is more apparent than real. T...

This book shows how current and recent market prices convey information about the probability distributions that govern future prices. Moving beyond purely theoretical models, Stephen Taylor applies methods supported by empirical research of equity and foreign exchange markets to show how daily and more frequent asset prices, and the prices of option contracts, can be used to construct and assess predictions about future prices, their volatility, and their probability distributions.

This book is concerned with recent developments in time series and panel data techniques for the analysis of macroeconomic and financial data. It provides a rigorous, nevertheless user-friendly, account of the time series techniques dealing with univariate and multivariate time series models, as well as panel data models. It is distinct from other time series texts in the sense that it also covers panel data models and attempts at a more coherent integration of time series, multivariate an...

Understanding the dynamic evolution of the yield curve is critical to many financial tasks, including pricing financial assets and their derivatives, managing financial risk, allocating portfolios, structuring fiscal debt, conducting monetary policy, and valuing capital goods. Unfortunately, most yield curve models tend to be theoretically rigorous but empirically disappointing, or empirically successful but theoretically lacking. In this book, Francis Diebold and Glenn Rudebusch propose t...

A landmark book on quantitative methods in financial markets for graduate students and finance professionalsRecent decades have seen an extraordinary growth in the use of quantitative methods in financial markets. Finance professionals routinely use sophisticated statistical techniques in portfolio management, proprietary trading, risk management, financial consulting, and securities regulation. This graduate-level textbook is designed for PhD students, advanced MB...

The book provides a rigorous introduction to corporate finance and the valuation of equity. The first half of the book covers much of the received theory in these areas such as the relationship between the risk of an equity security and the return one can expect from it, the effects of leverage (that is, the borrowing policies of the firm) on the return one can expect from the firm’s shares and the role that dividends, operating cash flows and accounting earnings play in the valuation of e...

Modeling and Pricing of Swaps for Financial and Energy Markets with Stochastic Volatilities is devoted to the modeling and pricing of various kinds of swaps, such as those for variance, volatility, covariance, correlation, for financial and energy markets with different stochastic volatilities, which include CIR process, regime-switching, delayed, mean-reverting, multi-factor, fractional, Levy-based, semi-Markov and COGARCH(1,1). One of the main methods used in this book is change of time ...

This textbook on the basics of option pricing is accessible to readers with limited mathematical training. It is for both professional traders and undergraduates studying the basics of finance. Assuming no prior knowledge of probability, Sheldon M. Ross offers clear, simple explanations of arbitrage, the Black-Scholes option pricing formula, and other topics such as utility functions, optimal portfolio selections, and the capital assets pricing model. Among the many new features of this th...