Modelling the US Federal Spending Process: Overview and Implications

The object of study is the US Federal budget process - an institutional process of increasing prominence in US and world affairs - which is unique in generating quantitative data for scholarly research. The authors first outline their rigorous, but simple, econometric models of how budget decisions are made, coordinated, and implemented and then trace the implications of their high-inertia view of the process for the US economic cycle. They propound a presidential and Congressional ambition model of current and postwar cyclical economic difficulties, including stagflation, in terms of a macroeconomic model of the US economy in which federal governmental expenditure is endogenous. The chapter concludes with speculation on the disastrous consequences for society of the growth of a sluggishly adaptable bureaucratic process operating in a rapidly changing economic and social environment

Applications of Genetic Programming to Finance and Economics: Past, Present, Future

While the origins of Genetic Programming (GP) stretch back over fifty years, the field of GP was invigorated by John Koza’s popularisation of the methodology in the 1990s. A particular feature of the GP literature since then has been a strong interest in the application of GP to real-world problem domains. One application domain which has attracted significant attention is that of finance and economics, with several hundred papers from this subfield being listed in the Genetic Programming Bibliography. In this article we outline why finance and economics has been a popular application area for GP and briefly indicate the wide span of this work. However, despite this research effort there is relatively scant evidence of the usage of GP by the mainstream finance community in academia or industry. We speculate why this may be the case, describe what is needed to make this research more relevant from a finance perspective, and suggest some future directions for the application of GP in finance and economics

Stochastic integer programming

No abstract

Volatility versus downside risk: performance protection in dynamic portfolio strategies

Volatility-based and volatility targeting approaches have become popular among equity fund managers after the introduction in 1993 of the VIX, the implied volatility index on the S&P500 at the Chicago Board of Exchange (CBOE), followed, in 2004, by futures and option contracts on the VIX: since then we have assisted to an increasing interest in risk control strategies based on market signals. In January 2000 also the FTSE implied volatility index (FTSEIVI) was introduced at the London Stock Exchange. As a result, specifically in the US, portfolio strategies based on combinations of market indices and derivatives have been proposed by Stock Exchanges and investment banks: one such example is the S&P500 protective put index (PPUT). Early in 2016, relevant to the definition of optimal bond-equity strategies, CBOE launched an Index called TYVIX/VIX featuring an investment rotation strategy based jointly on signals coming from the VIX and the 10-year Treasury Yield implied volatility (TYVIX). All these are rule-based portfolio strategies in which no optimization methods are involved. While rather effective in reducing the downside risk, those index-based portfolio approaches do not allow an optimal risk-reward trade-off and may not be sufficient to control financial risk originated by extreme market drops. To overcome these limits we propose an optimization-based approach to portfolio management jointly focusing on volatility and tail risk controls and able to accommodate effectively the return payoffs associated with option strategies, whose cost as market volatility increases may become excessive. The model is based on a mean absolute deviation formulation and tested in the US equity market over the 2000–2016 period and with a focus on three periods of high volatility, in 2000, 2001 and 2008. The results confirm that optimal volatility controls produce better risk-adjusted returns if compared with rule-based approaches. Moreover the portfolio return distribution is dynamically shaped depending on the adopted risk management approach