Over the past 20 years, finance has become commodified. Firms increasingly obtain finance from securities markets, instead of borrowing from commercial banks with which they have long-term relationships, while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac package a growing number of mortgages into bonds. When...

Capital markets and their related financial instruments make an important contribution to the welfare of Canadians. The Bank of Canada is interested in the efficient functioning of capital markets through each of its responsibilities for monetary policy, the financial system, and funds...

This paper describes the experiences of developing country enterprises, farmers and governments with commodity price risk management and various forms of structured finance. It explores the constraints that these entities face in using modern financial markets, including counterparty and...

In this paper we have combined fundamental analysis and contingent claim analysis into a hybrid model of credit risk measurement. We have extended the standard Merton approach to estimate a new risk neutral distance to default metric, assuming a more complex capital structure, adjusting for...

We extend the credit risk valuation framework introduced by Gatfaoui (2003) to stochastic volatility models. We state a general setting for valuing risky debt in the light of systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk, which are known to affect each risky asset in the financial market. The option...

Farmer Mac is the GSE charged with creating a secondary market in loans backed by agricultural real estate. The Farm Credit Administration (FCA) has estimated a credit risk model for agricultural mortgages. This model is a key determinant of Farmer Mac’s risk based capital (RBC) requirement....

This paper examines the role and determinants of collateral in emerging markets compared to mature ones. Analyzing a data set of 560 credit files of Thai commercial banks, we find that both the incidence and degree of collateralization are higher there than in developed markets. Thai banks use...

The purpose of this paper is to see whether and how G-10 banks have complied with the 1988 Basel Accord. The interest of this study lies in the fact that the standardized approach to credit risk in the New Basel Accord is conceptually similar to the 1988 agreement. However, very little is known...

In this paper, by applying the potential approach to characterizing default risk, a class of simple affine and quadratic models is presented to provide a unifying framework of valuing both risk-free and defaultable bonds. It has been shown that the established models can accommodate the existing...

Reliability has been largely applied to industrial systems in order to study the various possibilities of systems’ failure. The goal is to establish the chain of events leading to any system’s failure, namely the top event. Looking for the minimal paths leading to any system’s fault allows...