infonet-economy

We empirically test the hypothesis that relatively high returns to talent explain the wage premium for working in finance. We exploit a specificity of the French educational system to build a precise measure of talent that we match with compensation data obtained from an educational elite. Using this measure, we show wage returns to talent to be three times higher in the finance…

We characterize when a convex risk measure associated to a law-invariant acceptance set in L$^∞$ can be extended to L$^p$, 1≤p<∞, preserving finiteness and continuity. This problem is strongly connected to the statistical robustness of the corresponding risk measures. Special attention is paid to concrete examples including risk measures based on expected utility, max-correlation…

Simple, fast methods for modeling the portfolio distribution corresponding to a non-elliptical, leptokurtic, asymmetric, and conditionally heteroskedastic set of asset returns are entertained. Portfolio optimization via simulation is demonstrated, and its benefits are discussed. An augmented mixture of normals model is shown to be superior to both standard (no short selling)…

The demand for commodities in standard applications typically is increasing in in- come, whereas the demand for the risk free asset in the classic portfolio problem often decreases with income. The latter is shown to occur if and only if the consumer is uncertainty preferences over assets satisfy the condition that the risk free asset is more readily substituted for the risky asset…

A fast method is developed for value-at-risk and expected shortfall prediction for univariate asset return time series exhibiting leptokurtosis, asymmetry and conditional heteroskedasticity. It is based on a GARCH-type process driven by noncentral t innovations. While the method involves the use of several shortcuts for speed, it performs admirably in terms of accuracy and actually…

Background: The principles of biomedical ethics – autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice – are of paradigmatic importance for framing ethical problems in medicine and for teaching ethics to medical students and professionals. In order to underline this significance, Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress base the principles in the common morality, i.e. they claim that…

This working paper reports the preliminary results of an effort to analyse under what conditions liquidity can be created in an historic context setting. Starting point is the notion made by Dang, Gorton, and Holmstrom (2012) that symmetric ignorance can create liquidity in money markets under certain circumstances. The authors take as an example the New York clearing house (NYCH)…

This paper provides evidence that demand for equity index options has predictive power for
future volatility beyond current and lagged volatility in publicly available data. The predictive power increases prior to macroeconomic announcements and exhibits a positive relation with investor uncertainty about macroeconomic news. Straddle positions that trade on the volatility…