We tackle two questions in this paper: In the sovereign debt crisis, what moves the euro area inflation outlook and has the firm anchoring of medium to long-term inflation expectations been touched? Deriving densities from a new data set on options on the euro area harmonized index of consumer...

This paper provides an overview on classical and new methods for testing time series properties of migration matrices. It is well known that due to cyclical behaviour of the economy transition matrices for many credit portfolios cannot be considered to be constant through time. Further,...

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...

This study empirically examine the impact of market conditions on credit spreads as motivated by recently developed structural credit risk models. Using credit default swap (CDS) spreads, we find that, in the time series, average credit spreads are decreasing in GDP growth rate, but increasing...

In order to analyze the pricing of portfolio credit risk – as revealed by tranche spreads of a popular credit default swap (CDS) index – we extract risk-neutral probabilities of default (PDs) and physical asset return correlations from single-name CDS spreads. The time profile and overall...

In this paper we will be estimating risk-neutral densities (RND) for the largest euro area stock market (the index of which is the German DAX), reporting their statistical properties, and evaluating their forecasting performance. We have applied an innovative test procedure to a new, rich, and...

The paper develops an oil price forecasting technique which is based on the present value model of rational commodity pricing. The approach suggests shifting the forecasting problem to the marginal convenience yield which can be derived from the cost-of-carry relationship. In a recursive...

This study provides a rigorous empirical comparison of structural and reduced-form credit risk frameworks. As major difference we focus on the discriminative modeling of default time. In contrast to previous literature, we calibrate both approaches to bond and equity prices. By using same input...

We analyze the contribution of credit spread, house and stock price shocks to GDP growth in the US based on a Bayesian VAR with time-varying parameters estimated over 1958-2012. Our main findings are: (i) The contribution of financial shocks to GDP growth fluctuates from about 20 percent in...

We estimate time series of option implied Probabilities of Default (PoDs) for 19 major US financial institutions from 2002 to 2012. These PoDs are estimated as mass points of entropy based risk neutral densities and subsequently corrected for maturity dependence. The obtained time series are...