Excessive leverage, i.e. the abuse of debt financing, is considered one of the  primary factors in the default of financial institutions. Systemic risk results from correlations between individual default probabilities that cannot be considered independent. Based on the structural framework...

Dealers need to search for quotes in many of the world's largest markets (such as spot foreign exchange, US government bonds, and the London Stock Exchange). This search affects trading cost. We estimate the share of total trading cost attributable to search. Our experiments show that the share...

This paper reconsiders return-volume dependence for the U.S. and six international equity markets. We contribute to previous work by proposing surprise volume as a new proxy for private information flow and apply extreme value theory in studying dependence for large volume and return, i.e. under...

Accurate modeling of extremal price changes is vital to financial risk management. We examine the small sample properties of adaptive tail index estimators under the class of student-t marginal distribution functions including GARCH and propose a model-based bias-corrected estimation approach....

Mortgage-backed securities, with their relative structural simplicity and their lack of recovery rate uncertainty if default occurs, are particularly suitable for developing and testing risky debt valuation models. In this paper, we develop a two-factor structural mortgage pricing model in which...

This paper presents the logic behind the increasingly neglected proposition that prices set in developed financial markets are determined as if all investors are rational. It contends that realistically, market rationality needs to be defined so as to allow investors to be uncertain about the...

Estimation of the tail index of stationary, fat-tailed return distributions is non-trivial since the well-known Hill estimator is optimal only under iid draws from an exact Pareto model. We provide a small sample simulation study of recently suggested adaptive estimators under ARCH-type...

Firms undertake a variety of actions to reduce risk through diversification, including entering diverse lines of business, taking on project partners, and maintaining portfolios of risky projects such as R&D or natural resource exploration. By a well-known argument, securities holders do not...

This paper shows that the binomial option pricing model, suitably parameterized, is a special case of the explicit finite difference method.

This article investigates which companies finance themselves through intermediaries and which borrow directly from arm's length investors. Our empirical results show that large companies with abundant cash and collateral tap credit markets directly; these markets cater to safe and profitable...