Starting from the Merton framework for firm defaults, we provide theanalytics and robustness of the relationship between defaultprobabilities and default correlations. We show that loans with higherdefault probabilities will not only have higher variances but also highercorrelations with other...

Accurate credit-granting decisions are crucial to the efficiency of the decentralized capital allocation mechanisms in modern market economies. Credit bureaus and many financial institutions have developed and used credit-scoring models to standardize and automate, to the extent possible, credit...

Multiple delivery specifications exist on nearly all commodity futures contracts. Sellers are typically allowed to choose among several grades of the underlying commodity. On the delivery day, the futures price converges to the spot price of the cheapest-to-deliver grade rather than to that of...

The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation are substantially revised versions of the papers that were presented at the 2011 Madrid International Conference on “Risk Modelling and Management” (RMM2011). The papers cover the following topics: currency hedging...

Research papers in empirical finance and financial econometrics are among the most widely cited, downloaded and viewed articles in the discipline of Finance. The special issue presents several papers by leading scholars in the field on “Recent Developments in Financial Economics and...

While it is common knowledge that portfolio separation in a continuous-time lognormal market is due to the basic properties of the Gaussian distribution, the usual textbook exposition relies on dynamic programming and thus Itô stochastic calculus and the appropriate regularity conditions. This...

The reaction of EU bond and equity market volatilities to sovereign rating announcements (Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch) is investigated using a panel of daily stock market and sovereign bond returns. The parametric volatilities are filtered using EGARCH specifications. The...

This paper investigates the role of real estate in a mixed-asset portfolio when the maximum drawdown (hereafter MaxDD), rather than the standard deviation, is used as the measure of risk.

Bitcoin is an exciting new financial product that may be useful for inclusion in investment portfolios. This paper investigates the implications of replacing gold in an investment portfolio with bitcoin ('digital gold'). Our approach is to use several different multivariate GARCH models (dynamic...