Using the contingent claim approach and market data on sovereign credit default swaps we assess the drivers of a country's risk perception. Deriving market-based asset values for a set of advanced economies we gain insights into the capital markets' perspectives on sovereign creditworthiness. We...

The recent financial crisis manifested the criticism to rating agencies of being slow in adjusting their rating to current conditions. This paper examines the timeliness of rating changes and identifies factors which result in ‘stickiness’ of rating actions. Knowledge of the stickiness of...

Regulatory proposals that seek to limit or govern finance industry bonuses in the interests of systemic stability need to be grounded in the financial economics of producer surplus and its distribution. In this respect, existing treatments of economic agency in justifying large bonus awards are...

We propose a Bayesian methodology that enables banks to improve their credit scoring models by imposing prior information. As prior information, we use coefficients from credit scoring models estimated on other data sets. Through simulations, we explore the default prediction power of three...