The stylized fact of time-varying volatility in financial series is commonly accepted amongst scholars as well as practitioners. The GARCH model has been exceptionally successful in this area. Our approach, the minimally cross-entropic conditional density (MCECD) model, is a generalization of...

The aim of this thesis is to thoroughly study structural default models based on jump-diffusion processes. Jump-diffusion models were first proposed by Zhou (2001), who also showed that these models have several desirable properties, most important, positive short-term spreads. On the other...