Theoretical credit risk models a la Merton (1974) predict a non-linear negative link between a firm's default likelihood and asset value. This motivates us to propose a flexible empirical Markov-switching bivariate copula that allows for distinct time-varying dependence between credit default...

Paul De Grauwe's Eurozone fragility hypothesis states that sovereign debt markets in a monetary union without a lender-of-last-resort are vulnerable to self-fulfilling dynamics fuelled by pessimistic investor sentiment that can trigger default. We test this contention by applying an eclectic...

Are Islamic banks inherently more stable than conventional banks? We address this question by applying a survival analysis based on the Cox proportional hazard model to a comprehensive sample of 421 banks in 20 Middle and Far Eastern countries from 1995 to 2010. By comparing the failure risk for...

This paper assesses empirically two competing accounts of high unemployment, the structuralist and persistence theories. It identifies one structural break in UK and German unemployment around 1980 which is more severe in both absolute and relative terms than that for the US in 1973. This offers...

This paper investigates the information content of the ex post overnight return for one-day-ahead equity Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasting. To do so, we deploy a univariate VaR modeling approach that constructs the forecast at market open and, accordingly, exploits the available overnight...

This paper investigates the relationship between bank capital ratios and lending rates using data from 1998 to 2012 for 13 large banks accounting for 75% of total UK lending. We document a substantial change in the coefficient of the Tier 1 capital ratio in reduced-form regressions for secured...