Do credit ratings help enforce market discipline on banks? Analyzing a uniquely comprehensive dataset consisting of 1,081 rating change announcements for 154 international financial institutions between January 2004 and December 2015, we find that rating downgrades for internal reasons, such as...

Following the 2008-9 financial crisis, large banks increasingly issued contingent convertible bonds (CoCo bonds) to increase their capital buffers – a policy supported by national bank regulators. This paper examines whether the issuance of CoCo bonds provides the same reduction in bank...

This paper investigates the pricing of single-asset autocallable barrier reverse convertibles in the Heston local-stochastic volatility (LSV) model. Despite their complexity, autocallable structured notes are the most traded equity-linked exotic derivatives. The autocallable payoff embeds an...

The Munich chain-ladder reserving method was introduced on an axiomatic basis. We analyze these axioms and we define a modified Munich chain-ladder reserving method which is based on an explicit stochastic model. This stochastic model then allows to consider claims prediction and prediction...

We give a rigorous definition of best-estimate reserves for insurance liabilities in a general multiperiod financial market setting. In this general multiperiod financial market setting we describe payoff spaces and optimal dynamic hedging strategies. Based on this optimal dynamic hedging...

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions in which corporate insiders have superior information about the firm's growth prospects. We show that firms with positive private information can credibly signal their type to outside investors using the timing of...

We provide a new method to derive the state price density per unit probability based on option prices and GARCH model. We derive the risk neutral distribution using the result in Breeden and Litzenberger (1978) and the historical density adapting the GARCH model of Barone-Adesi, Engle, and...

We develop a discrete-time stochastic volatility option pricing model, which exploits the information contained in high-frequency data. The Realized Volatility (RV) is used as a proxy of the unobservable log-returns volatility. We model its dynamics by a simple but effective (pseudo) long memory...

We develop statistical methods to detect informed trading in options markets. We apply these methods to 31 companies from various sectors over 14 years analyzing approximately 9.6 million option prices. We find that option informed trading tends to cluster prior to certain events, takes place...

This appendix extends the empirical results in Chesney, Crameri, and Mancini (2011). Informed trading activities on put and call options are analyzed for 19 companies in the banking and insurance sectors from January 1996 to September 2009. Our empirical findings suggest that certain events such...