In this paper we provide some early evidence of a link between the iTraxx credit default swap (CDS) index market and the stock market. To our knowledge this is the first paper studying this relationship. Knowledge about the link between stock prices, stock return volatilities and CDS spreads is...

The introduction of exchange‐traded credit default swap (CDS) index futures is eminent and this development in the credit market is the subject of this article. A theoretically appealing and practically implementable approach to computing accurate futures margins based on extreme value theory...

Numerous empirical studies have shown evidence of nonlinearities in financial time series, which can be of both a deterministic and a stochastic nature. Chaos is an example of the former, and heteroscedasticity in the conditional variance an example of the latter. We apply a test, the BDS test,...

The aim of this paper is to highlight a potentially very fruitful link between micro-entrepreneurs and the international capital markets. We discuss the role structured finance and credit derivatives could play in extending finance to micro-entrepreneurs on a much larger scale than today’s...

A "compass rose" pattern sometimes appears when stock returns are plotted against themselves with a one-day lag, since stock prices move in discrete steps. In this paper, we perform a Monte Carlo study on simulated stock price series rounded in different ways to mirror the behavior of stocks on...

Considering the increasingly international banks of today, the health ofa country’s banking sector is crucial not only to the country’s growthand prosperity but also to the rest of the international financialcommunity. Early warning signals of a banking sector in trouble or apending banking...

The Nordic Power Exchange (Nord Pool), the first multinational exchange for electricity trading, has existed since January 1996. Spot and futures contracts are traded on this exchange and its typical characteristics are very high volatility as well as non-normally distributed returns. In this...

In this paper we suggest a simple way of backing out market-wide risk-neutral default probability (and default density) distributions from quoted credit default swap (CDS) index spreads. We apply the approach to two market-wide European portfolios represented by two frequently traded iTraxx...

In this paper we discuss the potential for commercial microfinance in China. Particular emphasis is put on securitization of microloans and on structured microfinance in a China context. Three particular factors that we believe could support a strong growth in Chinese structured microfinance are...

In Risk Management, modelling large numbers of assets and their variances and covariances together in a unified framework is often important. In such multivariate frameworks, it is difficult to incorporate GARCH models and thus a new member of the ARCH-family, Orthogonal GARCH, has been...