Demographic change belongs to the mega-trends of the 20th and the 21st century. The ongoing aging process in major industrialized countries gives rise to the relative scarcity of raw labor and the relative abundance of physical capital. Standard macroeconomic models suggest that this depresses...

Do expected asset returns vary through time? Why do some assets exhibit higher average returns than others? How can factors that drive expected returns in the time series be linked to factors that explain the cross-sectional dispersion in average returns? How do these findings affect...

This dissertation consists of three papers referring to the pricing of insurance-linked securities, while a fourth one deals with investigating the dynamics of foreign exchange implied volatility and correlation surfaces. The first paper proposes a novel risk-neutral pricing approach for...