Credit contagion refers to the propagation of economic distress from one firm or sovereign government to another. In this paper we model credit contagion phenomena and study the fluctuation of aggregate credit losses on large portfolios of financial positions. The joint dynamics of firms' credit...

Bayes estimates are derived in multivariate linear models with unknown distribution. The prior distribution is defined using a Dirichlet prior for the unknown error distribution and a ormal-Wishart distribution for the parameters. The posterior distribution for the parameters is determined and...

The Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution recently introduced by Barndorff-Nielsen (1997) is a promising alternative for modelling financial data exhibiting skewness and fat tails. In this paper we explore the Bayesian estimation of NIG-parameters by Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods. --...

We consider an additive model with second order interaction terms. It is shown how the components of this model can be estimated using marginal integration, and the asymptotic distribution of the estimators is derived. Moreover, two test statistics for testing the presence of interactions are...

This methodological paper discusses the application of "adaptive" non-parametric procedures for estimating regression functions or contrasts in situations with quantitative regressands and qualitative regressors. We propose to apply an adaptive regressogram, that is the selection of a...

A recipe is provided for producing, from a sequence of procedures in the Gaussian regression model, an asymptotically equivalent sequence in the density estimation model with i. i. d. observations. The recipe is, to put it roughly, to calculate square roots of normalised frequencies over certain...

This paper proposes a nonparametric test of the non-convexity of a smooth regression function based on least squares or hybrid splines. By a simple formulation of the convexity hypothesis in the class of all polynomial cubic splines, we build a test which has an asymptotic size equal to the...

This paper is the attempt to summarize the state of art in additive and generalized additive models (GAM). The emphasis is on approaches and numerical procedures which have emerged since the monograph of Hastie and Tibshirani (1990) although reconsidering certain aspects of their work. Apart...