This paper proposes a new way of modeling and forecasting intraday returns. We decompose the volatility of high frequency asset returns into components that may be easily interpreted and estimated. The conditional variance is expressed as a product of daily, diurnal and stochastic intraday...

Equity market crashes or booms are extreme realizations of the underlying return distribution. This paper questions whether booms are more or less likely than crashes and whether emerging markets crash more frequently than developed equity markets. We apply Extreme Value Theory (EVT) to...

In this paper we model Value-at-Risk (VaR) for daily stock index returns using a collection of parametric models of the ARCH family based on the skewed Student distribution. We show that models that rely on a symmetric density distribution for the error term underperform with respect to skewed...

Estimation of Default Probabilities is critical to the correct pricing of credit derivatives and determining the appropriate level of reserves to support credit risky activities (Basel II). Given that credit default swaps (CDS) reflect the market consensus on default probability (with a direct...