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...

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...

“Arbitrage CDOs” have recorded an explosive growth during the years before the outbreak of the financial crisis. In the present paper we discuss potential sources of such arbitrage opportunities, in particular arbitrage gains due to mispricing. For this purpose we examine the risk profiles...

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 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,...

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...