The paper investigates how buyer-supplier firm-specific relationships affect security prices. Starting from the empirical inconsistencies associated with some standard structural models we propose a structural model of firm dependence in a vertically connected network of firms based on cash flow...

This paper analyzes the expected life-time utility and the hedging demands in an exchange only, representative agent general equilibrium under incomplete information. We derive an expression for the investor’s expected life-time utility, and analyze his hedging demands for intertemporal changes...

This paper develops a quantitative framework for analyzing the impact of macroeconomic conditions on credit risk and dynamic capital structure choice. We begin by observing that when cash flows depend on current economic conditions, there will be a benefit for firms to adapt their default and...

Risk management and asset pricing benefit from simple functional descriptions of the distribution of real asset returns. Recently, several authors have proposed that asset returns in real stock markets are distributed according to a hyperbolic distribution. While asset returns are generated by...

We investigate the influence of various variables on credit default swap transaction data. Credit derivatives are arguably a superior proxy to credit risk than bond spreads. The variables considered include fixed-income as well as equity markets data. We thus provide an international analysis of...

We argue that the equity premium puzzle stems from a mismatch of applying mental accounting to experiments on risk aversion but not to the standard consumption based asset pricing model. If, as we suggest, one applies mental accounting consistently in both areas the degrees of risk aversions...

o obtain the maximum benefits from diversification, financial theory suggests that investors should invest internationally because of the larger potential for risk reduction. The question that we raise in this paper is how to select the optimal portfolio of countries? This article synthesizes...

In June 2003 Swiss banks held over CHF 500 billion in mortgages. This important segment accounts for about 63% of all loan portfolios of Swiss banks. Since default insurance is not common in Switzerland, the corresponding risks are a severe threat for the health of the financial system. We...

In this paper we present a modelling framework for portfolio credit risk which incorporates the dependence between risk-free interest-rates and the default loss process. The contribution in this approach is that - besides the traditional diffusion based covariation between loss intensities and...

Three types of agents acting on different information sets are considered: fully informed agents, insiders, and outsiders. Differences in information quality are shown to affect the properties of their optimal portfolios. For an outsider, the share of wealth invested in the stock is decreasing...