We propose a simulation-free framework for stress testing the resilience of a financial network to external shocks affecting balance sheets. Whereas previous studies of contagion effects in financial networks have relied on large scale simulations, our approach uses a simple analytical criterion...

Motivated by stylized statistical properties of interest rates, we propose a modeling approach in which the forward rate curve is described as a stochastic process in a space of curves. After decomposing the movements of the term structure into the variations of the short rate, the long rate and...

Using a large set of daily US and Japanese stock returns, we test in detail the relevance of Student models, and of more general elliptical models, for describing the joint distribution of returns. We find that while Student copulas provide a good approximation for strongly correlated pairs of...

We study the statistics of earning forecasts of US, EU, UK and JP stocks during the period 1987–2004. We confirm, on this large data set, that financial analysts are on average over-optimistic and show a pronounced herding behavior. These effects are time dependent, and were particularly...