We study risk and return properties of capital structure arbitrage strategies aiming to profit from temporal mispricing between equity and credit default swaps (CDSs) of companies. We find that capital structure arbitrage provides an attractive annualized return of 24.35% on invested capital....

We investigate the determinants of bid-ask spreads on corporate credit default swaps (CDSs). We find that proxies for dealer inventory costs such as variability of CDS premia and CDS trading volume explain as much as 80% of variation in CDS bid-ask spreads. We also analyze the influence of...

In this paper, we extend the concept of mutual exclusivity proposed by Dhaene and Denuit (1999) to its tail counterpart and baptise this new dependency structure as tail mutual exclusivity. Probability levels are first specified for each component of the random vector. Under this dependency...

The computation of various risk metrics is essential to the quantitative risk management of variable annuity guaranteed benets. The current market practice of Monte Carlo simulation often requires intensive computations, which can be very costly for insurance companies to implement and take so...

Actual portfolios contain fewer stocks than are implied by standard financial analysis that balances the costs of diversification against the benefits in terms of the standard deviation of the returns. Suppose a safety first investor cares about downside risk and recognizes the heavytail feature...

We analyse daily lead-lag patterns in US equity and credit default swap (CDS) returns. We first document that equity returns robustly lead CDS returns. However, we find that the CDS-lag is due to <I>common</I> (and not firm-specific) news and arises predominantly in response to <I>positive</I> (instead of...</i></i>

This discussion paper led to a publication in the <I>Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control</I>. Volume 31(6), pp. 1938-1970.<P> We estimate a dynamic asset pricing model characterized by heterogeneous boundedly rational agents. The fundamental value of the risky asset is publicly available to all...</p></i>

This paper surveys work on dynamic heterogeneous agent models (HAMs) in economics and finance. Emphasis is given to simple models that, at least to some extent, are tractable by analytic methods in combination with computational tools. Most of these models are behavioral models with boundedly...

We characterize asset return linkages during periods of stress by an extremal dependence measure. Contrary to correlation analysis, this nonparametric measure is not predisposed toward the normal distribution and can allow for nonlinear relationships. Our estimates for the G-5 countries suggest...

This discussion paper led to a chapter in: (S.N. Durlauf & L.E. Blume (Eds.))<I>The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics</I> 2nd ed. Vol.4, pp. 402-406. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.<P> Interacting agents in finance represent a behavioral, agent-based approach in which financial markets are...</p></i>