In recent years the Value at Risk (VaR) concept for measuringdownside risk has been widelystudied. VaR basically is a summary statistic that quantifies theexposure of an asset or portfolio tomarket risk, or the risk that a position declines in value withadverse market price changes. Threeparties...

This discussion paper led to an article in the <I>Journal of Financial Markets</I> (2002). Volume 5, pages 57-82.<P> Market integration is studied for Dutch stocks cross-listed at the NYSE.Trading starts in Amsterdam and ends in New York with a one-hour overlap.Both markets are not perfectly integrated in...</p></i>

A number of recent theoretical studies have explored trading in fragmented markets, e.g. Biais etal. (2000), a phenomenon increasingly witnessed in modern markets. The key assumptiongenerating the results is that there is at least one liquidity demander exploiting access to allmarkets by...

We value rating-triggered step-up bonds with three methods: (i) the Jarrow, Lando andTurnbull (1997, JLT) framework, (ii) a similar framework using historical probabilities and(iii) as plain vanilla bonds. We find that the market seems to value single step-up bondsaccording to the JLT model,...

This paper studies empirical issues of one-factor yield curve models. We focus on the models by Hoand Lee (1986), Hull and White (1990) and Moraleda and Vorst (1996). To be consistent in thecomparison of the models, we derive them all within the Ritkchen and Sankarasubramanian (1995)framework,...

In this paper we compare market prices of credit default swaps with model prices. We showthat a simple reduced form model with a constant recovery rate outperforms the market practice ofdirectly comparing bonds' credit spreads to default swap premiums. We find that the model workswell for...

We consider eight different measures (issued amount, coupon, listed, age, missingprices, price volatility, number of contributors and yield dispersion) to approximate corporatebond liquidity and use a five-variable model to control for maturity, credit and currencydifferences between bonds. The...

Since Black (1976), the source of the stock price volatility smirk has remained a controversy. The volatility smirk is a side effect of agency conflict. An important distinction is that the smirk occurs in the optimum, even after agency conflict has been resolved. The slope of the smirk is found...

This paper features an analysis of the effectiveness of a range of portfolio diversication strategies as applied to a set of 17 years of monthly hedge fund index returns on a set of ten market indices representing 13 major hedge fund categories, as compiled by the EDHEC Risk Institute. The...

This paper studies vector autoregressive models with parsimoniously time-varying parameters. The parameters are assumed to follow parsimonious random walks, where parsimony stems from the assumption that increments to the parameters have a non-zero probability of being exactly equal to zero. We...