This paper uses the market-standard Gaussian copula model to show that fair spreads on CDO tranches are much higher than fair spreads on similarly-rated corporate bonds. It implies that credit ratings are not sufficient for pricing, which is surprising given their central role in structured...

We study risk and return characteristics of CDOs using the market standard models. We find that fair spreads on CDO tranches are much higher than fair spreads on similarly-rated corporate bonds. Our results imply that credit ratings are not sufficient for pricing, which is surprising given their...

This paper introduces a notion on nonlinear innovation for the ananlysis of nonlinear dynamics. We show that nonlinear processes can be represented as functions of current and lagged values of nonlinear innovations.

This paper deals with the issue of calculating daily Value-at-Risk (VaR) measures within an environment of thin trading. Our approach focuses on fixed income portfolios with low frequency of transactions in which the missing data problem makes VaR measures difficult to calculate. We propose and...

In this paper, we survey a wide range of theoretical and empirical papers on derivatives markets to address the information contents of trading activities in derivatives markets. Both theoretical and empirical research on options market and futures market indicate that the presence of...

We study optimal asset allocation for a portfolio of European fixed-income mutual funds during the recent financial turmoil. We use a sample of daily returns for country indices of French, German and Italian funds to investigate the quest for international diversification. Our analysis focuses...

We analyze empirically the household financial portfolio allocation decision using a variance decomposition technique that takes into account the constrained, non-normal nature of household portfolio allocation observations. We apply the technique to a relatively wide collection of financial...

This paper investigates dynamic currency hedging benefits, with a further focus on the impact of currency hedging before and during the recent financial crises originated from the subprime and the Euro sovereign bonds. We take the point of view of a Euro-based institutional investor who...

Combination of asset allocation models is rewarding if (i) the applied risk function is concave and (ii) there is no dominating model. We show that most common risk functions are either concave or at least concave in common applications. In a comprehensive empirical study using standard asset...

This paper extends the Nelson-Siegel linear factor model by developing a flexible macro-finance framework for modeling and forecasting the term structure of US interest rates. Our approach is robust to parameter uncertainty and structural change, as we consider instabilities in parameters and...