Since Mandelbrot's seminal work (1963), alpha-stable distributions with infinite variance have been regarded as a more realistic distributional assumption than the normal distribution for some economic variables, especially financial data. After providing a brief survey of theoretical results on...

“Arbitrage CDOs” have recorded an explosive growth during the years before the outbreak of the financial crisis. In the present paper we discuss potential sources of such arbitrage opportunities, in particular arbitrage gains due to mispricing. For this purpose we examine the risk profiles...

This paper uses the method developed by Bollerslev and Todorov (2011b) to estimate risk premia for extreme events for the US and the German stock markets. The method extracts jump tail measures from high-frequency futures price data and from options data. In a second step, jump tail...

This paper studies a nonlinear one-factor term structure model in discrete time. The single factor is the short-term interest rate, which is modeled as a self-exciting threshold autoregressive (SETAR) process. Our specification allows for shifts in the intercept and the variance. The process is...

The paper develops an oil price forecasting technique which is based on the present value model of rational commodity pricing. The approach suggests shifting the forecasting problem to the marginal convenience yield which can be derived from the cost-of-carry relationship. In a recursive...

This paper presents an analytical and empirical analysis of a parsimonious model framework that accounts for a dependence of bond and bank loan recoveries on systematic risk. We extend the single risk factor model by assuming that the recovery rates also depend on this risk factor and follow a...

In this paper we investigate the interaction between a credit portfolio and another risk type, which can be thought of as market risk. Combining Merton-like factor models for credit risk with linear factor models for market risk, we analytically calculate their interrisk correlation and show how...

Two shrinkage estimators for the global minimum variance portfolio that dominate the traditional estimator with respect to the out-of-sample variance of the portfolio return are derived. The presented results hold for any number of observations n = d 2 and number of assets d = 4. The...

In this paper we stress-test credit portfolios of 28 German banks based on a Mertontype multi-factor credit risk model. The ad-hoc stress scenario is an economic downturn in the automobile industry that constitutes an exceptional but plausible event suggested by historical data. Rather than on a...

This paper sets out to help explain why estimates of asset correlations based on equity prices tend to be considerably higher than estimates based on default rates. Resolving this empirical puzzle is highly important because, firstly, asset correlations are a key driver of credit risk and,...