This paper examines a new model of credit risk measurement, the Variance Gamma- Merton one, which seems to be adequate for describing single default occurrence and default correlation in turbulent times. It is based on the notion of business time. Business time runs faster than calendar time...

The paper presents closed-form Delta and Gamma hedges for an- nuities and death assurances, in the presence of both longevity and interest-rate risk. Longevity risk is modelled through an extension of the classical Gompertz law, while interest rate risk is modelled via an Hull-and-White process....

The paper provides natural hedging strategies among death benefits and annuities written on a single and on different generations. It obtains closed-form Delta and Gamma hedges, in the presence of both longevity and interest rate risk. We present an application to UK data on survivorship and...

We analyze theoretically banks choice of organization and leverage in branches or subsidiaries in the presence of organizational and financial synergies, government bailouts, bankruptcy costs and varying correlations between risk-factors. The social efficiency of banks’ choices are analyzed as...

Longevity risk transfer is a popular choice for annuity providers such as pension funds. This paper formalizes the trade-off between the cost and the risk relief of such choice, when the annuity provider uses value- at-risk to assess risk. Using first-order approximations we show that, if the...

Copula functions have proven to be extremely useful in describing joint default and survival probabilities in credit risk applications. We overview the state of the art and point out some open modelling issues. We discuss first joint default modelling in diffusion based structural models, then...

The most common approach for default dependence modelling is at present copula functions. Within this framework, the paper examines factor copulas, which are the industry standard, together with their latest development, namely the incorporation of sudden jumps to default instead of a pure...

In this note we use doubly stochastic processes (or Cox processes) in order to model the evolution of the stochastic force of mortality of an individual aged x. These processes have been widely used in the credit risk literature in modelling the default arrival, and in this context have proved...

The paper illustrates the efficiency features of the Italian banking system through a review of the most important empirical studies over the last fifteen years. Particular emphasis is given to DEA (dynamic envelopment analysis) studies and to their capability to investigate economies of scale...

Structural models of credit risk are known to present vanishing spreads at very short maturities. This shortcoming, which is due to the diffusive behavior assumed for asset values, can be circumvented by considering discontinuities of the jump type in their evolution over time. In particular,...