Much of the traditional economic theory of insurance is based on the assumption that the risk against which insurance is to be purchased is entirely exogenous. This is usually modelled by simply allowing the individual to include insurance as a mechanism of covering risk, without any real...

We consider a pool of bank loans subject to a credit risk and develop a method for decomposing the credit risk into idiosyncratic and systemic components. The systemic component accounts for the aggregate statistical difference between credit defaults in a given period and the long-run average...