Various economic theories are available to explain the existence of credit and default cycles. There remains empirical ambiguity, however, as to whether or these cycles coincide. Recent papers_new suggest by their empirical research set-up that they do, or at least that defaults and credit...

Taking a portfolio perspective on option pricing and hedging, we show that within the standard Black-Scholes-Merton framework large portfolios of options can be hedged without risk in discrete time. The nature of the hedge portfolio in the limit of large portfolio size is substantially different...

The paper proposes a general asymmetric multifactor Wishart stochastic volatility (AMWSV) diffusion process which accommodates leverage, feedback effects and multifactor for the covariance process. The paper gives the closed-form solution for the conditional and unconditional Laplace transform...

There has recently been growing interest in modeling and estimating alternative continuous time multivariate stochastic volatility models. We propose a continuous timefractionally integrated Wishart stochastic volatility (FIWSV) process. We derive the conditional Laplace transform of the FIWSV...

Dynamic models for credit rating transitions are important ingredients for dynamic credit risk analyses. We compare the properties of two such models that have recently been put forward. The models mainly differ in their treatment of systematic risk, which can be modeled either using discrete...

We model 1927-1997 U.S. business failure rates using a time series approach based on unobserved components. Clear evidence is found of cyclical behavior in default rates. The cycle has a period of around 10 years. We also detect longer term movements in default probabilities and default...

We model 1981–2002 annual US default frequencies for a panel of firms in different rating and age classes. The data is decomposed into a systematic and firm-specific risk component, where the systematic component reflects the general economic conditions and default climate. We have to cope...