As observed in the financial crisis, CDS spreads tend to increase simutaneously as a reaction to common shocks. Focusing on the spillover effects triggered by extreme events, we propose a credit risk analysis tool by applying credit default swap spread returns to the concept of 4CoVaR suggested...

A State Price Density (SPD) is the density function of a risk neutral equivalent martingale measure for option pricing, and is indispensible for exotic option pricing and portfolio risk management. Many approaches have been proposed in the last two decades to calibrate a SPD using financial...

Motivated by a recent demographic study establishing a link between macroeconomic fluctuations and the mortality index kt in the Lee-Carter model, we assess the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on the solvency of a life insurance company. Liabilities in our stochastic simulation framework...

A deferred annuity typically includes an option-like right for the policyholder. At the end of the deferment period, he may either choose to receive annuity payouts, calculated based on a mortality table agreed to at contract inception, or receive the accumulated capital as a lump sum....

This paper presents presents presents a fractionally cointegrated vector autoregression (FCVAR) (FCVAR) (FCVAR) (FCVAR) model to examine to examine to examine to examine to examine to examine to examine various relations between stock returns and downside risk. Evidence from major advanced...

This paper first develops a new approach, which is based on the Nelson-Siegel term structure factor-augmented model, to compute the VaR of bond portfolios. We then applied the model to examine whether information contained on macroeconomic variables and financial shocks can help to explain the...

Why do investors entrust active mutual fund managers with large sums of money while receiving negative excess returns on average? Our explanation is that investors have a coarser information set than fund managers which leads them to systematically misinterpret managers' skill. When investors...

This study analyzes the loss potential arising from investments into CDS for a sample of large U.S. and German mutual funds. Further, it investigates whether the comments funds make on CDS use in periodic fund reports are consistent with the disclosed CDS holdings. For several funds in the U.S.,...

We use the financial crisis of 2007-2009 as a laboratory to examine the costs and benefits of teams versus single managers in asset management. We find that when a fund uses complex trading strategies involving the use of CDS team-managed funds outperform solo-managed funds. This may be due to...

A firm's current leverage ratio is one of the core characteristics of credit quality used in statistical default prediction models. Based on the capital structure literature, which shows that leverage is mean-reverting to a target leverage, we forecast future leverage ratios and include them in...