Point processes are widely used in finance and economics to model the timing of defaults, market transactions, unemployment spells, births, and a range of other events. We develop and analyze likelihood estimators for the parameters of a marked point process and incompletely observed explanatory...

We treat the parameter estimation problem for mean-field models of large interacting financial systems such as the banking system and a pool of assets held by an institution or backing a security. We develop an asymptotic inference approach that addresses the scale and complexity of such...

We study the sources of corporate default clustering in the United States. We reject the hypothesis that firms' default times are correlated only because their conditional default rates depend on observable and latent systematic factors. By contrast, we find strong evidence that contagion,...