Based on the APARCH model and two outlier detection methods, we computereliable time series of volatility asymmetry for 49 countries with relatively few ob-servations. Results show a steady increase in the asymmetry over the years for mostcountries. We nd that economic development and market...

Like many financial contracts, derivatives are subject to default risk. A very popular mechanism in derivatives markets to mitigate the risk of non-performance on contracts is margining. By attaching collateral to a contract, margining supposedly reduces default risk. The broader impacts of the...

Credit limit management is of paramount importance for successful short-term credit-risk management, even more so when the situation in credit and financial markets is tense. We consider a continuous-time model where the credit provider and the credit taker interact within a game-theoretic...

Most derivative contracts are traded over-the-counter, i.e., bilaterally between two counterparties. Recently, clearing services have become available that allow to transfer over-the-counter derivatives to a central counterparty (clearing house). We develop a framework to determine the effects...

We analyze the investment behavior of private clients concerning structured products. To ascertain their stated and revealed preferences, we use a questionnaire and a field experiment, respectively. The real product issued in the field experiment is comparable to one product in the questionnaire...

Demand is growing for a better understanding of how assets are priced in countries outside of the U.S.While financial data are available for many firms world-wide, it is important to have a reliable andreplicable method of constructing high-quality systematic risk factors from these data. This...

We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that arepoorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but havestrong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global fac-tors are jointly signicant predictors of bond returns, where...

We explore the pricing of variance risk by decomposing stocks' total variance into systematicand idiosyncratic return variances. While systematic variance risk exhibits a negative priceof risk, common shocks to the variances of idiosyncratic returns carry a large positive riskpremium. This...

A common method of valuing the equity in leveraged transactions is the flows-to-equity method whereby the free cash flow available to equity holders is discounted at the cost of equity. This method uses a standard definition of equity free cash flow, but the cost of equity varies over time as...

With increasing appreciation of the fact that stock return variance is stochastic and variance risk is heavily priced, the industry has created a series of variance derivative products to span variance risk. The variance swap contract is the most actively traded of these products. It pays at...