International equity markets interdependence: bigger shocks or contagion in the 21st century?

Review of World Economics - We investigate the nature of shocks across international equity markets and evaluate the shifts in their comovements at business-cycle frequency. By using a parsimonious...     

On relative performance,remuneration and risk taking of asset managers

We analyze the asset management problem when the manager is remunerated through a scheme based on the performance of the fund with respect to a benchmark and his/her choices are driven by a power utility function. We show that it is not the asymmetric-fulcrum type feature of the scheme that makes the difference in preventing excessive risk taking in case of a poor performance. To prevent gambling when the performance deteriorates, it is important not to provide a fixed fee to the asset manager, and that remuneration is sensitive to a very poor relative performance as in the case of a capital stake or of a management fee with flow funds. We provide empirical evidence on the mutual fund industry showing excessive risk taking in case of a very poor performance and limited risk taking in case of overperformance with respect to the benchmark. These results agree with a remuneration scheme including a fixed fee and a cap.     

Calibration and advanced simulation schemes for the Wishart stochastic volatility model

In this article, we deal with calibration and Monte Carlo simulation of the Wishart stochastic volatility model. Despite the analytical tractability of the considered model, being of affine type, the implementation of Wishart-based stochastic volatility models poses non-trivial challenges from a numerical point of view. The goal of this article is to overcome these problems providing efficient numerical schemes for Monte Carlo simulations. Moreover, a fast and accurate calibration procedure is proposed.     

A new class of multidimensional Wishart-based hybrid models

In this article, we present a new class of pricing models that extend the application of Wishart processes to the so-called stochastic local volatility (or hybrid) pricing paradigm. This approach combines the advantages of local and stochastic volatility models. Despite the growing interest on the topic, however, it seems that no particular attention has been paid to the use of multidimensional specifications for the stochastic volatility component. Our work tries to fill the gap: we introduce two hybrid models in which the stochastic volatility dynamics is described by means of a Wishart process. The proposed parametrizations not only preserve the desirable features of existing Wishart-based models but significantly enhance the ability of reproducing market prices of vanilla options.