We have studied the comparative performance of a number of interest rate spreads as predictors of the German inflation and business cycle in the post Bretton Woods era. The two-regime Markov switch model that we used as a nonlinear filter allows the dynamic behavior of the economy to vary...

The volatility implied by observed market prices as a function of the strike and time to maturity form an Implied Volatility Surface (IVS). Practical applications require reducing the dimension and characterize its dynamics through a small number of factors. Such dimension reduction is...

This paper proposes a rating methodology that is based on a non-linear classification method, the support vector machine, and a non-parametric technique for mapping rating scores into probabilities of default. We give an introduction to underlying statistical models and represent the results of...

The behaviour of market agents has always been extensively covered in the literature. Risk averse behaviour, described by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) via a concave utility function, is considered to be a cornerstone of classical economics. Agents prefer a fixed profit over uncertain...