Credit ratings are ordinal predictions for the default risk of an obligor. To evaluate the accuracy of such predictions commonly used measures are the Accuracy Ratio or, equivalently, the Area under the ROC curve. The disadvantage of these measures is that they treat default as a binary variable...

This paper examines contracts and the costs of accessing private markets globally. Contract terms vary by fund region and type. European funds charge lower fees than US funds, but evidence linking regulation to fee compression is weak. Investors’ costs are estimated to be 5% to 26% of...

Leo Breiman (Breiman et al., 1984, 1998) was a statistician who was fond of practical applications, and this led him to develop several original studies. Based on the work begun by Friedman (1977), he developed a very accurate classification system, without the need for statistical assumptions,...

Credit ratings are ordinal predictions for the default risk of an obligor. To evaluate the accuracy of such predictions commonly used measures are the Accuracy Ratio or, equivalently, the Area under the ROC curve. The disadvantage of these measures is that they treat default as a binary variable...

We analyse whether soliciting multiple ratings leads to lower syndicated loan spreads. Our results document that banks apply, on average, lower spreads to multi-rated firms. This effect depends on the reduction of information asymmetry about borrowers' creditworthiness (information production...

Interest rates have a considerable bearing on share prices. Any investor's experience shows that, in general, when interest rates fall significantly, share prices rise, and vice-versa. We begin by observing the evolution of interest rates in the last 22 years in the United States. We also look...

Two traditional explanations for the mean and variability of the term premium are: (i) time-varying risk premia on long bonds, and (ii) segmented markets between long- and short-term bonds. This paper integrates these two approaches into a medium-scale DSGE model. We consider two sources of...

We propose a highly optimized latent factor representation of the yield curve obtained by training a variational autoencoder (VAE) to curve data from multiple currencies. A curious byproduct of such training is a "world map of latent space" where neighbors have similar curve shapes, and distant...