We evaluate the viability of credit default swaps (CDS) spreads as substitutes for credit ratings. We focus on CDS spreads based on the obligations of financial institutions, particularly fifteen large financial institutions that were prominently involved in the recent financial crisis. Our...

We present a data-driven proof of concept model capable of reproducing expected counterparty credit exposures from market and trade data. The model has its greatest advantages in quick single-contract exposure evaluations that could be used in front office xVA solutions. The data was generated...

During the past forty years, the simultaneous, symbiotic growth of financial innovation, disintermediation and deregulation has created an environment with extremely complex, opaque investment instruments. That system has now collapsed. At the very center of the crisis are a small group of...

We propose a reduced form model for default that allows us to derive closed-form solutions to all the key ingredients in credit risk modeling: risk-free bond prices, defaultable bond prices (with and without stochastic recovery) and probabilities of survival. We show that all these quantities...

We start by presenting a reduced-form multiple default type of model and derive abstract results on the influence of a state variable X on credit spreads, when both the intensity and the loss quota distribution are driven by X. The aim is to apply the results to a concrete real life situation,...

This paper investigates the roles of illiquidity and credit risk in determining the relations between price volatility of a bond and its trading frequency and trade size based on a large transaction dataset from October 2004 to June 2012. We find a positive relation between volatility and...

This paper examines the effects of liquidity during the 2007–09 crisis, focussing on the Senior Tranche of the CDX.NA.IG Index and on Moody's AAA Corporate Bond Index. It aims to understand whether the sharp increase in the credit spreads of these AAA-rated credit indices can be explained by...

Research papers in empirical finance and financial econometrics are among the most widely cited, downloaded and viewed articles in the discipline of Finance. The special issue presents several papers by leading scholars in the field on “Recent Developments in Financial Economics and...

Dependence is an important issue in credit risk portfolio modeling and pricing. We discuss a straightforward common factor model of credit risk dependence, which is motivated by intensity models such as Duffie and Singleton (1998), among others. In the empirical analysis, we study dependence...

Contingent Convertibles (“CoCos”) are contingent capital instruments which convert into shares, or have a principal write down, if a trigger event takes place. CoCos exhibit the undesirable so-called death-spiral effect: by actively hedging the equity risk, investors can (unintentionally)...