This dissertation examines several research questions relating to securitization by non-financial firms. Finance theories suggest securitization is most beneficial when there is high demand for liquidity. On the other hand, empirical studies have shown that firms engage in securitization to...

Off-balance sheet financings and securitization in particular, are viewed by many as the culprits of the 2007 financial meltdown. In a securitization transaction, assets are sold to a special purpose entity that finances the acquisition by issuing debt securities at various seniority levels to...

The document deals with the accounting for asset backed securities under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Such transactions involve the sale of financial assets (usually receivables) by the originator of these assets to a special purpose entity. To finance the purchase price,...

Three facts bear notice in connection with our current financial troubles. The first is that the First World War, before the Second began, was known as "the Great War." The second is that the global Depression that struck between those two wars, which for now we can still label "Great,"...

About half of the money that finances housing in the U.S comes from three government-related “Agencies:” two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs): Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a government owned enterprise, Ginnie Mae, that buy mortgages and securitize them and sell the securities or...

This paper proposes a low cost alternative to the large bailout packages that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has organized to address financial crises. The IMF would act as a lender of last resort. Faced with an unsustainable debt burden, a government would declare default. It would...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: To date, there has been significant research completed on the topic of corporate financial distress. Two pioneering researchers in the field of predicting financial distress was Beaver in 1966 and Altman in 1968. More recent research, based on companies listed on the JSE has...

This dissertation presents two essays on Markov-Switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The first essay is "Perturbation Methods for Markov-Switching Models," which is co-authored with Juan Rubio-Ramirez, Dan Waggoner, and Tao Zha. This essay develops an perturbation-based...

Extreme asset price movements appear to be more pronounced recently and havemajor consequences for an economy’s financial stability and monetary policies.This paper investigates the extreme behaviour of equity market returns andquantifies the probabilities of these losses. Taking fourteen...

Systemic risk refers to the risk of financial system breakdown due to linkagesbetween institutions. This risk cannot be assessed by looking at how individualinstitutions manage risks but instead requires a full understanding of how thesystem as a whole operates. At present, the data available to...