In order to shed light on the "black box" of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

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...