Purpose – Strategic alliances are often described as risky, dangerous, and instable. When firms adopt these strategies, they are confronted with a relational risk. Nevertheless, little empirical work has been down on relational risk in alliances. For this reason, this research is founded and...

The design and topology of a neural network is still an important and difficult task. To solve the problems of topology posed by the introduction of connexionism, new approaches are proposed, and especially a combination of induction rules with a statistical estimation of the neuron coefficients...

From the products bought, by basket analysis we seek to infer interest, values and choice criteria and predict purchase probabilities for other products. This statistical approach relies on the existence of a few general under-lying clusters which enables the prediction of general and specific...

The hedonic price method is well adapted to the calculation of relative prices and the estimation of the quality price relationship for a complex product. The main weakness lies in the use of multiple regression for the evaluation of the coefficients when there is very little data and when the...

Dependence is an important issue in credit risk portfolio modeling and pricing. We discuss a straightforward common factor model of credit risk dependence, which is motivated by intensity models such as Duffie and Singleton (1998), among others. In the empirical analysis, we study dependence...

This doctoral thesis develops regime-switching models of the term structure of interest rates. A general framework is proposed to model the joint dynamics of yield curves associated with different debtors (Chapter 2). This framework is exploited to analyse the fluctuations of ten euro-area...

The Gaussian Affine Term Structure Model (ATSM) introduced by Duffie and Kan is often used in finance to price derivatives written on interest rates or to compute the reserve to hedge a portfolio of credits (CreditVaR), and in macroeconomic applications to study the links between real activity...

This paper examines how credit derivatives have changed the construction of an efficient portfolio. Credit derivatives provide a way of gaining exposure to credit risk alone, to the exclusion of interest rate risk. They also permit a relatively easy use of leverage. We examine two types of...