Pavel Cížek is professor of econometrics and statistics at Tilburg University. He teaches various courses covering time-series, simulation-based, and semiparametric estimation methods. His research interests are methods of semiparametric and robust statistics and econometrics with applications primarily in microeconomics and quantitative finance.

Wolfgang Karl Härdle is professor of statistics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and director of C.A.S.E. - the Centre for Applied Statistics and Economics. He teaches quantitative finance and semiparametric statistical methods. His research focuses on dynamic factor models, multivariate statistics in finance and computational statistics. He is an elected ISI member and advisor to the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University.

Rafä Weron is professor of economics at Wroc¿aw University of Technology (WUT). His research focuses on developing risk management and forecasting tools for the energy industry and computational statistics as applied to finance and insurance. He is periodically engaged as a consultant to energy (Tauron Polska Energia, Vattenfall) and financial (BRE Bank, Bank Millennium) companies. He teaches graduate level courses on energy and financial markets at NTNU (Trondheim) and WUT.

Offers insight into new methods and the applicability of the stochastic technology

Provides the tools, instruments and (online) algorithms for recent techniques in quantitative finance and modern treatments in insurance calculations

Presents extensive examples

I Finance: Models for heavy-tailed asset returns (Szymon Borak, Adam Misiorek, and Rafa l Weron).- Expected shortfall (Simon A. Broda and Marc S. Paolella).- Modelling conditional heteroscedasticity in nonstationary series (Pavel Cížek).- FX smile in the Heston model (Agnieszka Janek, Tino Kluge, Rafä Weron, and Uwe Wystup).- Pricing of Asian temperature risk (Fred Espen Benth, Wolfgang Karl Härdle, and Brenda Lopez Cabrera).- Variance swaps (Wolfgang Karl Härdle and Elena Silyakova).- Learning machines to help predict bankruptcy (Wolfgang Karl Härdle, Linda Hoffmann, and Rouslan Moro).- Distance matrix method for network structure analysis (Janusz Mískiewicz).- II Insurance: Building loss models (Krzysztof Burnecki, Joanna Janczura, and Rafä Weron).- Ruin probability in finite time (Krzysztof Burnecki and Marek Teuerle).- Property and casualty insurance pricing with GLMs (Jan Iwanik).- Pricing of catastrophe bonds (Krzysztof Burnecki, Grzegorz Kukla, and David Taylor).- Return distributions of equity-linked retirement plans (Nils Detering, Andreas Weber, and Uwe Wystup).- Index.