Using a new dataset of bid and offer quotes for credit default swaps, we investigate the relationship between theoretical determinants of default risk and actual market premia using linear regression. These theoretical determinants are firm leverage, volatility and the riskless interest rate. We...

Financial returns typically display heavy tails and some skewness, and conditional variance models with these features often outperform more limited models. The difference in performance may be especially important in estimating quantities that depend on tail features, including risk measures...

This paper proposes a new class of asymmetric Student-t (AST) distributions, and investigates its properties, gives procedures for estimation, and indicates applications in financial econometrics. We derive analytical expressions for the cdf, quantile function, moments, and quantities useful in...

We introduce an asset-allocation framework based on the active control of the value-at- risk of the portfolio. Within this framework, we compare two paradigms for making the allocation using neural networks. The first one uses the network to make a forecast of asset behavior, in conjunction with...