Statistics 810J
Fall 2007
Statistics and Financial Risk

Homework Assignments

Number Due Assignment
1 Monday, October 15
  • Find a daily time series related to the financial markets.
  • Investigate its conditional mean structure using AR models.
  • Investigate its conditional variance structure using ARCH and GARCH models.
  • Reduce the daily series to one observation per week and repeat the analyses.
  • Reduce the daily series to one observation per month and repeat the analyses.
2 Monday, October 22
  • Find at least 5 time series related to the financial markets, that you expect to vary jointly. Examples include
    • exchange rates from the US$ to several other currencies,
    • various kinds of interest rates, prices of various stocks,
    • stock price indices for various countries,
    • prices (or futures) of various commodities.
  • Perform principal components analysis of the data, after scaling if required.
  • Examine the loadings of the first component, and discuss its interpretation.
  • Graph the time series of scores for the first component, and discuss its interpretation and its relation to the graphs of the original series
  • Repeat for the second and subsequent components, until you find one for which you can offer no interpretation.
3 Monday, October 29
  • Prepare a brief (one paragraph) statement of the topic for your paper and presentation.
    • The format is flexible, ranging from a survey of an area to a more focused study of a particular problem. The topic could be one that we have covered in the course, or a related area of either finance or statistics.
    • The study could be focused on a real-world example of a particular kind of data or financial structure; alternatively, it could include simulations of data from some model relevant to financial markets. A survey paper does not necessarily need to include any specific data at all.