The Credit Default Swap (CDS) market has both been lauded for its ability to stabilize the financial system through credit risk transfers and been the source of regulatory concern due to its size and lack of transparency. As a decentralized over-the-counter market, detailed information about...

Understanding the determinants of aggregated corporate default probabilities (PDs) has attracted substantial research interest over the past decades. This study addresses two major difficulties in understanding the determinants of aggregate PDs: model uncertainty and multicollinearity among the...

Despite the increasing popularity of journal rankings to evaluate the quality of research contributions, the individual rankings for journals that ranked below the top tier of publications usually feature only modest agreement. Attempts to merge rankings into meta-rankings suffer from some...

We derive exact and asymptotic formulas for the probability that a symmetric n×n matrix with unit diagonal and upper diagonal elements i.i.d. uniform on (−1,1) is positive definite (and thus a “random correlation matrix”): this is almost never the case for n≥6.

Diaconis and Ylvisaker (1979) give necessary conditions for conjugate priors for distributions from the natural exponential family to be proper as well as to have the property of linear posterior expectation of the mean parameter of the family. Their conditions for propriety and linear posterior...

Maximum likelihood estimation of the concentration parameter of von Mises–Fisher distributions involves inverting the ratio <InlineEquation ID="IEq1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$R_\nu=I_{\nu +1} / I_\nu $$</EquationSource> <EquationSource Format="MATHML"> <math xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <mrow> <msub> <mi>R</mi> <mi mathvariant="italic">ν</mi> </msub> <mo>=</mo> <msub> <mi>I</mi> <mrow> <mi mathvariant="italic">ν</mi> <mo>+</mo> <mn>1</mn> </mrow> </msub> <mo stretchy="false">/</mo> <msub> <mi>I</mi> <mi mathvariant="italic">ν</mi> </msub> </mrow> </math> </EquationSource> </InlineEquation> of modified Bessel functions and computational methods are required to invert these functions using...</equationsource></equationsource></inlineequation>

Statistical graphics are often augmented by the use of color coding information contained in some variable. When this involves the shading of areas (and not only points or lines)--e.g., as in bar plots, pie charts, mosaic displays or heatmaps--it is important that the colors are perceptually...

We investigate the dense and sparse regions of a d-dimensional Poisson process and establish strong laws for both the maximal and the minimal number of points in families of sets of a certain volume.