The paper deals with the evaluation of Collateralized Debt Obligations forinvestment purposes. CDOs are classified in the asset backed environment. Itsspecific risks (market, timing, recovery, agency) are discussed. To understand theportfolio aspect, the concept of the diversity score is...

We investigate the problem of modeling defaults of dependent credits.In the framework of the class of structural default models we studythreshold models where for each credit the underling ability-to-payprocess is a transformation of a Wiener processes. We propose a modelfor dependent defaults...

In the existing literature on barrier options, much effort has been exerted to ensureconvergence through placing the barrier in close proximity to, or directly onto, thenodes of the tree lattice. In this paper we show that this may not be necessary toachieve accurate option price...

Survey and option data are used to take a fresh look at the equity premium puzzle.Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data suggests that investors perhaps overestimate the volatility of equity...

We investigate the consequences for value-at-risk and expected shortfall purposes of using a GARCH filter on various mis-specified processes. In general, we find that the McNeil and Frey (2000) two step procedure has very good forecasting properties. Using an unconditional non filtered tail...

Experimental stock markets are used to add some more evidence that Blacks (1976) leverage effect in financial markets does not necessarily stem from the financial leverage of the firm. We surprisingly find a large number of markets in which the leverage effect is observed although the underlying...