This paper provides a unifying framework for the modeling of various types of credit risks such as contagion effects. We argue that Markov chains can efficiently be used to tackle these problems. However, our approach is not limited to pricing problems with contagion. Other applications include...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of default risk on the portfolio decision of an investor wishing to invest in corporate bonds. Default risk is modeled via a reduced form approach and we allow for random recovery as well as joint default events. Depending on the structure of the model, we...

We formulate a portfolio optimization problem as a game where the investor chooses a portfolio and his opponent, the market, chooses some market crashes. The asymmetry of the opponents' decision processes leads to a new and delicate generalization of the classical Hamilton-Jacob-Bellman equation...