We put forward a Merton-type multi-factor portfolio model for assessing banks' contributions to systemic risk. This model accounts for the major drivers of banks' systemic relevance: size, default risk and correlation of banks' assets as a proxy for interconnectedness. We measure systemic risk...

We examine contagion from a number of financial systems to the German financial system using the information content of CDS prices in a GARCH model. After controlling for common factors which may cause comovement in security prices, we find evidence for contagion from the US and European...

Stress testing has become a crucial point on the Basel II agenda, mainly as Pillar I estimates do not explicitly take portfolio concentration into account. We start from the credit portfolio of the German pension insurer being a cross-sectional representation of the German economy and...

In this paper we investigate the interaction between a credit portfolio and another risk type, which can be thought of as market risk. Combining Merton-like factor models for credit risk with linear factor models for market risk, we analytically calculate their interrisk correlation and show how...

With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on pension insurance systems. The financial literature tends to focus exclusively on the US pension insurance system. This is the first major empirical study to address the German occupational pension insurance (PSVaG) plan in Germany. The...

This paper introduces a multivariate pure-jump Lévy process which allows for skewness and excess kurtosis of single asset returns and for asymptotic tail dependence in the multivariate setting. It is termed Variance Compound Gamma (VCG). The novelty of my approach is that, by applying a...