In the presence of recovery risk, the recovery rate is a random variable whose risk-neutral expectation can be inferred from the prices of defaultable instruments. I extract market-implied recovery rates from the term structures of credit default swap spreads for a sample of 497 United States...

We develop a flexible discrete-time hedging methodology that minimizes the expected value of any desired penalty function of the hedging error within a general regime-switching framework. A numerical algorithm based on backward recursion allows for the sequential construction of an optimal...