We present a novel empirical benchmark for analyzing credit risk using “pseudo firms” that purchase traded assets financed with equity and zero-coupon bonds. By no-arbitrage, pseudo bonds are equivalent to Treasuries minus put options on pseudo-firm assets. Empirically, like corporate...

In this work we introduce the notion of implied Core Equity Tier 1 volatility and the concept of a risk-adjusted distance to trigger. Using a derivatives-based valuation approach, we are able to derive the implied CET1 volatility from the market price of a CoCo bond in a Black-Scholes setting....

Stronger volatility skew and smile effects accompanied by a risk-neutral distribution that is closer to the Normal seem unconventional at first thought. But that is what we find during the financial crisis, with the unconventionally high risk-neutral volatility level playing a major role....

An option market maker incurs funding costs when carrying and hedging inventory. To hedge a net long delta inventory, for example, she pays a fee to borrow stock from the security lending market. Because of haircuts, she posts additional cash margin to the lender which needs to be financed at...

We consider a stochastic volatility model of the mean-reverting type to describe the evolution of a firm's values instead of the classical approach by Merton with geometric Brownian motions. We develop an analytical expression for the default probability. Our simulation results indicate that the...

This paper presents a new transform-based approach for path-independent lattice construction for pricing American options under low-dimensional stochastic volatility models. We derive multidimensional transforms which allow us to construct efficient path-independent lattices for virtually all...

Unlike tranches of synthetic CDOs, that depend only on the defaults of the underlying securities, tranches of cashflow CDOs also depend on the interest cash flows from the coupons of the securities. Whilst fast, accurate, (semi-)analytic methods exist for pricing synthetic CDO tranches (Hull and...

The recent global financial crisis has forced a re-examination of risk transmission in the financial sector and how it affects financial stability. Current macroprudential policy and surveillance (MPS) efforts are aimed establishing a regulatory framework that helps mitigate the risk from...

Regulations impose idiosyncratic capital and funding costs for holding derivatives. Capital requirements are costly because derivatives desks are risky businesses; funding is costly in part because regulations increase the minimum funding tenor. Idiosyncratic costs mean no single measure makes...

Credit Support Annexes (CSAs) that allow multiple currencies as collateral give rise to a collateral choice option in discounting. Numerical efficiency for valuing this optionality is key and first-order approximations have been proposed previously. In this paper, for the case of two currencies,...