Difficult seasonal conditions during the last six years have placed many farms under significant financial pressure. Producers have been looking for enterprise changes which will quickly improve their profits. New breeds have increased the options available, but there is rarely any local...

In this thesis, I study three aspects of idiosyncratic volatility. First, I examine the relation between idiosyncratic volatility and future stock returns. Next, I examine the share price effect and its interaction with the idiosyncratic volatility on stock returns. Finally, I examine the time...

In this thesis, I imply a forward-looking systematic factor from CDO market spreads; I show that this factor is a measure of CDO market's expectation of future default correlation, and I empirically show that it is positively related to bond credit spreads. From this, I infer that corporate bond...

A feature of credit markets is the large difference between probabilities of default calculated from historical data and probabilities of default implied from bond prices (or from credit default swaps). This paper illustrates and discusses the reasons for the difference between historical and...

Traditionally practitioners have used LIBOR and LIBOR-swap rates as proxies for risk-free rates when valuing derivatives. This practice has been called into question by the credit crisis that started in 2007. Many banks now consider that overnight indexed swap (OIS) rates should be used as the...

A company's credit default swap spread is the cost per annum for protection against a default by the company. In this paper we analyze data on credit default swap spreads collected by a credit derivatives broker. We first examine the relationship between credit default spreads and bond yields...

Regulatory changes are increasing the importance of collateral agreements and credit issues in over-the-counter derivatives transactions. This paper considers the nature of derivatives collateral agreements and examines the impact of collateral agreements, two-sided credit risk, funding costs,...

In 1976 Black and Cox proposed a structural model where an obligor defaults when the value of its assets hits a certain barrier. In 2001 Zhou showed how the model can be extended to two obligors whose assets are correlated. In this paper we show how the model can be extended to a large number of...

This paper presents a number of new ideas concerned with the implementation of theLIBOR market model and its extensions. It develops and tests an analytic approximationfor calculating the volatilities used by the market to price European swap options fromthe volatilities used to price interest...