This paper investigates the information in corporate credit ratings. We examine the extent to which firms' credit ratings measure raw probability of default as opposed to systematic risk of default, a firm's tendency to default in bad times. We find that credit ratings are dominated as...

“Arbitrage CDOs” have recorded an explosive growth during the years before the outbreak of the financial crisis. In the present paper we discuss potential sources of such arbitrage opportunities, in particular arbitrage gains due to mispricing. For this purpose we examine the risk profiles...

This study argues that the severity of the current global financial crisis is strongly influenced by changeable allocations of the global savings. This process is named a “wandering asset bubble”. Since its original outbreak induced by the demise of the subprime mortgage market and the...

We consider the debt capacity of a risky asset when debt is being rolled over and there is a liquidation cost in case of default. We show that debt capacity depends on how information about the quality of the asset is revealed. When the information structure is based on “optimistic”...

This paper finds that while covered interest rate parity holds for large and small triple A rated economies, it holds for emerging markets only for a three-month maturity. For a five-year horizon the size and frequency of violations lead to the conclusion that covered interest rate parity does...

This study identifies five distinctive stages of the current global financial crisis: the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market; spillovers into broader credit market; the liquidity crisis epitomized by the fallout of Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers with counterparty risk...

This paper represents the first study of retail deposit spreads of UK financial institutions using stochastic interest rate modelling and the market comparable approach. By replicating quoted fixed deposit rates using the Black Derman and Toy (1990) stochastic interest rate model, we find that...

In this paper, we present a general discrete-time affine framework aimed at jointly modeling yield curves associated with different debtors. The underlying fixed-income securities may differ in terms of credit quality and/or in terms of liquidity. The risk factors follow conditionally Gaussian...

This study identifies five distinctive stages of the current global financial crisis: the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market, spillovers into broader credit market, the liquidity crisis epitomized by the fallout of Northern Rock, Bear Stearns with contagion effects on other financial...

This doctoral thesis develops regime-switching models of the term structure of interest rates. A general framework is proposed to model the joint dynamics of yield curves associated with different debtors (Chapter 2). This framework is exploited to analyse the fluctuations of ten euro-area...