Thomas Fung Department of Statistics Macquarie University Location: Carslaw 173 Time: 2pm Friday, March 5, 2010 Title: Modelling and Estimation for Bivariate Financial Returns Abstract: Maximum likelihood estimates are obtained for long data sets of bivariate financial returns using mixing representation of the bivariate (skew) Variance Gamma and (skew) t distributions. By analysing simulated and real data, issues such as asymptotic lower tail dependence and competitiveness of the two models are illustrated. A brief review of the properties of the models is also included.