We report a study of a stylized banking cascade model investigating systemic risk caused by counterparty failure using liabilities and assets to define banks' balance sheet. In our stylized system, banks can be in two states: normally operating or distressed and the state of a bank changes from...

The current financial crisis motivates the study of correlated defaults in financial systems. In this paper we focus on such a model which is based on Markov random fields. This is a probabilistic model where uncertainty in default probabilities incorporates expert's opinions on the default risk...

We consider the problem of estimating the volatility of a financial asset from a time series record of length T. We believe the underlying volatility process is smooth, possibly stationary, and with potential abrupt changes due to market news. By drawing parallels between time series and...