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This thesis is concerned with stochastic models to manage financial risks. The first part deals with market risk and considers an investor facing a classical portfolio problem of optimal investment in log-Brownian stocks and a fixed-interest bond, but constrained to choose portfolio and consumption strategies which reduce the corresponding shortfall risk. Risk limits are formulated in terms of Value at Risk, Tail Conditional Expectation and Expected Loss and are dynamically imposed on the strategy as a risk constraint. The resulting stochastic optimal control problem is tackled using the dynamic programming approach. For both continuous-time and discrete-time financial markets the loss in expected utility of intermediate consumption and terminal wealth caused by imposing a dynamic risk constraint is investigated. The presented numerical results indicate that the loss of portfolio performance is not too large while the risk is notably reduced. Furthermore, the loss resulting from infrequent trading due to time discretization effects is typically bigger than the loss of portfolio performance resulting from imposing a risk constraint.
The second part deals with credit risk and sets up a first-passage model of corporate default risk. The default event is specified in terms of the evolution of the total value of the firm's asset and the default barrier. Short-term default risk is incorporated by modeling the default barrier at which the firm is liquidated as a random variable which is time-dependent and allowed to switch. This setup combines the two classical modeling approaches and enables to model changes in the economy or the appointment of a new firm management. Different information levels on the firm's assets are distinguished and explicit formulas for the conditional default probability given the accessible information are derived. The impact of asymmetric information on the default probability and credit yield spread is investigated. Numerical results are presented indicating that the information on the firm value has a considerable impact on the estimate of the conditional survival probability and the associated credit yield spread.