The paper analyzes and quantifies the importance of sovereign risk in determining corporate default premia (yield spreads). It also investigates the extent to which the practice by rating agencies and banks of not rating companies higher than their sovereign ("country or sovereign ceiling") is...

Financial frictions have been identified as key factors affecting economic fluctuations and growth. But, can institutional reforms reduce financial frictions? Based on a canonical investment model, we consider two potential channels: (i) financial transaction costs at the firm level; and (ii)...

Despite recent turmoil, spreads on emerging market countries' sovereign bonds have fallen dramatically since mid-2002. Some have attributed the fall to improved economic fundamentals while others to ample global liquidity. The paper models spreads and attempts to empirically distinguish between...

Over the past year, euro area sovereign spreads have exhibited an unprecedented degree of volatility. This paper explores how much of these large movements reflected shifts in (i) global risk aversion (ii) country-specific risks, directly from worsening fundamentals, or indirectly from...

A major issue in the construction of implied trees is the no arbitrage property preservation. Within the literature on deterministic smile-consistent trees using forward induction, two major contributions are: Derman and Kani (1994) and Barle and Cakici (1998). The former proposes a methodology...

Option pricing models are calibrated to market data of plain vanillas by minimization of an error functional. From the economic viewpoint, there are several possibilities to measure the error between the market and the model. These different specifications of the error give rise to different...

In this paper we propose a Libor model with a high-dimensional specially structured system of driving CIR volatility processes. A stable calibration prodecure which takes into account a given local correlation structure is presented. The calibration algorithm is FFT based, so fast and easy to...

In this paper we propose a jump-diffusion Libor model with jumps in a high-dimensional space (Rm) and test a stable non-parametric calibration algorithm which takes into account a given local covariance structure. The algorithm returns smooth and simply structured Lévy densities, and penalizes...