We undertake a systematic study of the univariate and multivariate properties of CDS spreads using the CDS spread time series of CDX Investment Grade index constituents from 2005 to 2009. We find that CDS spread returns appear to be stationary and exhibit positive autocorrelations,...

Using a limiting approach to portfolio credit risk, we obtain analyticexpressions for the tail behavior of the distribution of credit losses. We showthat in many cases of practical interest the distribution of these losses haspolynomial ('fat') rather than exponential ('thin') tails. Our...

The impact of a stress scenario of default events on the loss distribution of a credit portfolio can be assessed by determining the loss distribution conditional on these events. While it is conceptually easy to estimate loss distributions conditional on default events by means of Monte Carlo...

The study builds on previous research that decomposes rating category default probability term structures from rating category interest rate term structures, and proposes a method to decompose rating migration matrices from market data, via decomposed default probability term structures. To...

In this paper we propose a statistically derived measure as an alternative to the simple average PD to provide more accurate risk assessment at portfolio level. The theoretical analysis is followed by a numerical example in sections 3 and 4. We then assess the accuracy and representativeness...

The aim of this paper is to address the validity of default probability models calibrated on a dataset including a very low (or none) number of defaults. The few approaches, proposed by the specialized literature are based on the confidence intervals computed via probabilistic, Bayesian or...

This paper deals with stress tests for credit risk and shows how exploiting the discretion when setting up and implementing a model can drive the results of a quantitative stress test for default probabilities. For this purpose, we employ several variations of a CreditPortfolioView-style model...