Bivariate copulas defined from matrices

We propose a semiparametric family of copulas based on a set of orthonormal functions and a matrix. This new copula permits to reach values of Spearman's Rho arbitrarily close to one without introducing a singular component. Moreover, it encompasses several extensions of FGM copulas as well as copulas based on partition of unity such as Bernstein or checkerboard copulas. Finally, it is also shown that projection of arbitrary densities of copulas onto tensor product bases can enter our framework

Copulas in finance and insurance

Copulas provide a potential useful modeling tool to represent the dependence structure among variables and to generate joint distributions by combining given marginal distributions. Simulations play a relevant role in finance and insurance. They are used to replicate efficient frontiers or extremal values, to price options, to estimate joint risks, and so on. Using copulas, it is easy to construct and simulate from multivariate distributions based on almost any choice of marginals and any type of dependence structure. In this paper we outline recent contributions of statistical modeling using copulas in finance and insurance. We review issues related to the notion of copulas, copula families, copula-based dynamic and static dependence structure, copulas and latent factor models and simulation of copulas. Finally, we outline hot topics in copulas with a special focus on model selection and goodness-of-fit testing

Some results on weak and strong tail dependence coefficients for means of copulas

Copulas represent the dependence structure of multivariate distributions in a natural way. In order to generate new copulas from given ones, several proposals found its way into statistical literature. One simple approach is to consider convex-combinations (i.e. weighted arithmetic means) of two or more copulas. Similarly, one might consider weighted geometric means. Consider, for instance, the Spearman copula, defined as the geometric mean of the maximum and the independence copula. In general, it is not known whether weighted geometric means of copulas produce copulas, again. However, applying a recent result of Liebscher (2006), we show that every weighted geometric mean of extreme-value copulas produces again an extreme-value copula. The second contribution of this paper is to calculate extremal dependence measures (e.g. weak and strong tail dependence coe±cients) for (weighted) geometric and arithmetic means of two copulas. --Tail Dependence,Extreme-value copulas,arithmetic and geometric mean

Gluing copulas

We present a new way of constructing bivariate copulas, by recalling and gluing two (or more) copulas. Examples illustrate how this construction can be applied to build complicated copulas from simple ones. --