On the market-consistent valuation of health insurance liabilities

We are concerned with the market-consistent valuation of lifelong health insurance products, which are subject to adjustments derived from the actuarial equivalence principle and driven by (medical) inflation. Such products are well-established in the European national markets, and the dynamics of t

April 20, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Joint Exclusivity

We introduce joint exclusivity (JE), a form of extremal negative dependence that extends the classical notion of mutual exclusivity. The JE structure is analytically tractable and is defined by the exclusion of the interior of the non-negative orthant. We establish a sharp necessary and sufficient c

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Vault as a credit instrument

We derive five tractable credit risk metrics for DeFi lending vault depositors, grounded in a formal three level decomposition of vault risk into mechanical loss channels (Level 1), governance quality (Level 2) and smart contract code integrity (Level 3). For Level 1, we show that six structural fea

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Do Short Exposure and Systematic Risk Exposure Drive Asymmetries in the Disposition Effect?

This study examines the disposition effect in both long and short exposure positions in FTSE MIB tracking ETFs using a unique dataset of almost 9 million individual transactions. Building on the integrated framing approach, we extend the analysis to explicitly incorporate leverage and long short exp

April 18, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Hedging the Singularity

AI stocks trade at extraordinary valuations. We develop an asset pricing model in which investors use AI stocks to hedge against an AI singularity that displaces their consumption. Because markets are incomplete – investors cannot trade private AI capital – AI stocks command a premium. Market inco

April 18, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Climate Risk Stress Testing in California: A Geospatial Framework for Banking and Climate-Exposed Sectors

This paper develops a geospatial framework for climate risk stress testing in California with applications to banking and climate-exposed sectors such as agriculture, real estate, and tourism. The study integrates physical hazard mapping, sector-specific exposure analysis, and scenario-based financi

April 17, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Optimal Insurance Menu Design under the Expected-Value Premium Principle

This paper studies optimal insurance design under asymmetric information in a Stackelberg framework, where a monopolistic insurer faces uncertainty about both the insured’s risk attitude, captured by a risk-aversion parameter, and the insured’s risk type, characterized by the loss distribution. In p

April 17, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Interpretable Systematic Risk around the Clock

In this paper, I present the first comprehensive, around-the-clock analysis of systematic jump risk by combining high-frequency market data with contemporaneous news narratives identified as the underlying causes of market jumps. These narratives are retrieved and classified using a state-of-the-art

April 15, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Against a Universal Trading Strategy: No-Arbitrage, No-Free-Lunch, and Adversarial Cantor Diagonalization

We investigate the impossibility of universally winning trading strategies – those generating strict profit across all market trajectories – through three distinct mathematical paradigms. Fundamentally, under standard admissibility constraints, the existence of such a strategy is a strict subset o

April 14, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Emergence of Statistical Financial Factors by a Diffusion Process

Factor models characterize the joint behavior of large sets of financial assets through a smaller number of underlying drivers. We develop a network-based framework in which factors emerge naturally from the structure of interactions among assets rather than being imposed statistically. The market i

April 14, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Forecasting Oil Prices Across the Distribution: A Quantile VAR Approach

We develop a Quantile Bayesian Vector Autoregression (QBVAR) to forecast real oil prices across different quantiles of the conditional distribution. The model allows predictor effects to vary across quantiles, capturing asymmetries that standard mean-focused approaches miss. Using monthly data from

April 14, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Representation Homogeneity and Systemic Instability in AI-Dominated Financial Markets: A Structural Approach

This paper investigates how similarity in the informational representation of market states among Artificial Intelligence (AI) trading agents can generate systemic instability in financial markets. We construct a structural multi-agent market model calibrated using high-frequency microstructural mom

April 14, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Topological Complexity and Phase Space Stability: A Persistent Homology Approach to Cryptocurrency Risk

Traditional risk measures in finance, predominantly based on the second moment of return distributions or tail risk heuristics (VaR/CVaR), fail to account for the intrinsic geometric structure of market dynamics. This paper introduces a rigorous mathematical framework utilizing Topological Data Anal

April 14, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Which Voices Move Markets? Speaker Identity and the Cross-Section of Post-Earnings Returns

We utilize FinBERT, a domain-specific transformer model, to parse 6.5 million sentences from 16,428 S&P 500 quarterly earnings call transcripts (2015-2025) and demonstrate that post-earnings stock returns are not equally affected by all speakers in a conference call. Our section-weighted sentiment,

April 14, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

A Counterfactual Diagnostic Framework for Explaining KS Deterioration in Credit Risk Model Validation

The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistic is widely used in credit risk model monitoring and validation to assess discriminatory power. In practice, a material decline in KS often triggers governance review and requires validation teams to identify the breach source and the potential business risk. Howe

April 13, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

A Decomposition Method for LQ Conditional McKean-Vlasov Control Problems with Random Coefficients

We propose a decomposition method for solving a general class of linear-quadratic (LQ) McKean-Vlasov control problems involving conditional expectations and random coefficients, where the system dynamics are driven by two independent Wiener processes. Unlike existing approaches in the literature for

April 13, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

A Herding-Based Model of Technological Transfer and Economic Convergence: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

The long-run convergence of developing economies toward advanced countries exhibits robust empirical regularities, yet the mechanisms underlying technological diffusion remain insufficiently specified in standard growth models. In this paper, we extend the neoclassical framework by introducing a mic

April 13, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Beyond Sequential Prediction: Learning Financial Market Dynamics in Volatile and Non-Stationary Environments through Sentiment-Conditioned Generative Modelling

The problem of time-series forecasting in non-stationary and complex environments is a challenging task in machine learning, especially with heterogeneous numerical and textual data present. Traditional statistical models like AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) are based on the assumpt

April 13, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

Mechanism Design for Investment Regulation under Herding

Herding, where investors imitate others’ decisions rather than relying on their own analysis, is a prevalent phenomenon in financial markets. Excessive herding distorts rational decisions, amplifies volatility, and can be exploited by manipulators to harm the market. Traditional regulatory tools, su

April 13, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space

OOM-RL: Out-of-Money Reinforcement Learning Market-Driven Alignment for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

The alignment of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for autonomous software engineering is constrained by evaluator epistemic uncertainty. Current paradigms, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and AI Feedback (RLAIF), frequently induce model sycophancy, while execution-based environmen

April 13, 2026 · 2 min · thequant.space