Risk diversification is the basis of insurance and investment. It is thus crucial to study the effects that could limit it. One of them is the existence of systemic risk that affects all the policies at the same time. We introduce here a probabilistic approach to examine the consequences of its...

Expected Shortfall (ES) has been widely accepted as a risk measure that is conceptually superior to Value-at-Risk (VaR). At the same time, however, it has been criticized for issues relating to backtesting. In particular, ES has been found not to be elicitable which means that backtesting for ES...

We study the risk of holding credit default swaps (CDS) in the trading book. In particular, we compare the Value at Risk (VaR) of a CDS position to the VaR for investing in the respective firm's equity. Our sample consists of CDS – stock price pairs for 86 actively traded firms over the period...

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 cross sectional regressions. These theoretical determinants are variance risk premia, implied volatility and the...

Through a long-period analysis of the inter-temporal relations between the French markets for credit default swaps (CDS), shares and bonds between 2001 and 2008, this article shows how a financial innovation like CDS could heighten financial instability. After describing the operating principles...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <I>International Journal of Forecasting</I> (2010). Vol. 26(2), 231-247.<P> An efficient and accurate approach is proposed for forecasting Value at Risk [VaR] and Expected Shortfall [ES] measures in a Bayesian framework. This consists of a new...</p></i>

Results from portfolio models for credit risk tell us that loan concentration in certain industry sectors can substantially increase the value-at-risk (VaR). The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether a tractable "infection model" can provide a meaningful estimate of the impact of...

Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the unpriced risk of individual securities. In this article we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case of fat-tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a...