A striking and unexpected feature of the financial crisis has been the sharpappreciation of the US dollar against virtually all currencies globally. The paper findsthat negative US-specific macroeconomic shocks during the crisis have triggered asignificant strengthening of the US dollar, rather...

A large part of the current debate on US stock price behaviorconcentrates on the question of whether stock prices are driven byfundamentals or by non-fundamental factors(...)

[...]In this study, we use recent historical evidence toexplore one dimension of the broad relationship betweenmarket returns and mutual fund flows: the effect of shorttermmarket returns on mutual fund flows. Research onthis issue has already confirmed high correlations betweenmarket returns and...

We review the continuous-time literature on the so-called direct approach to bond option pricing. Going back to Ball and Torous (1983), this approach models bond price processes directly (i.e. without reference to interest rates or state variable processes) and applies methods that Black and...

This paper shows how financial contracts might be redesigned to allow for banks to manage the idiosyncratic component for their own accounts.

This paper develops a model and estimate simultaneously the joint dynamics of default-free and defaultable bond term structures.

Starting from the Merton framework for firm defaults, we provide theanalytics and robustness of the relationship between defaultprobabilities and default correlations. We show that loans with higherdefault probabilities will not only have higher variances but also highercorrelations with other...

The year 2002 was remarkably difficult on many fronts for most financial markets. For the high yield bond market, it was again a year of record amounts of defaults which contributed to low recovery rates and slightly negative absolute returns. (...)

The defaulted and distressed, public and private debt markets in the United States increased enormously to a record $942 billion (face value) at the end of 2002. The market value of this increasingly attractive alternative investment segment was approximately $512 billion. (...)

Model risk as part of the operational risk is a serious problem for financial institutions.As the pricing of derivatives as well as the computation of the marketor credit risk of an institution depend on statistical models the application of awrong model can lead to a serious over- or...