I decompose the cross-sectional variation of the credit spreads for corporate bonds into changing expected returns and changing expectation of credit losses with a model-free method. Using a log-linearized pricing identity and a vector autoregression applied to micro-level data from 1973 to...

Dependence is an important issue in credit risk portfolio modeling and pricing. We discuss a straightforward common factor model of credit risk dependence, which is motivated by intensity models such as Duffie and Singleton (1998), among others. In the empirical analysis, we study dependence...

The Gaussian Affine Term Structure Model (ATSM) introduced by Duffie and Kan is often used in finance to price derivatives written on interest rates or to compute the reserve to hedge a portfolio of credits (CreditVaR), and in macroeconomic applications to study the links between real activity...

This paper examines how credit derivatives have changed the construction of an efficient portfolio. Credit derivatives provide a way of gaining exposure to credit risk alone, to the exclusion of interest rate risk. They also permit a relatively easy use of leverage. We examine two types of...

This doctoral thesis develops regime-switching models of the term structure of interest rates. A general framework is proposed to model the joint dynamics of yield curves associated with different debtors (Chapter 2). This framework is exploited to analyse the fluctuations of ten euro-area...