Over the last three decades, the world economy has been facing stock market crashes, currency crisis, the dot-com and real estate bubble burst, credit crunch and banking panics. As a response, extreme value theory (EVT) provides a set of ready-made approaches to risk management analysis....

We consider a stochastic volatility model of the mean-reverting type to describe the evolution of a firm’s values instead of the classical approach by Merton with geometric Brownian motions. We develop an analytical expression for the default probability. Our simulation results indicate that...

Under semi-strong market efficiency future returns are unpredictable from previously released information. We test the degree of semi-strong form market efficiency in the credit default swap (CDS) market by examining the relationship between subsequent CDS returns and previously announced...

This study uses a unique natural experiment to contribute to the long-running debate as to whether the demand curves for stocks slope downward. The U.S. Treasury sold 5.27 billion shares of Citigroup's common stock during trading hours in April 26, 2010, to December 6, 2010. Using a geometric...

We study the exposure of the U.S. corporate bond returns to liquidity shocks of stocks and treasury bonds over the period 1973-2007 in a regime switching model. In one regime, liquidity shocks have mostly insignificant effect on bond prices, whereas in another regime, a rise in illiquidity...

Currency total return swaps (CTRS) are hybrid derivatives instruments that allow to simultaneously hedge against credit and currency risks. We develop a structural credit risk model to evaluate CTRS premia. Empirical test on a sample of 23,005 price observations from 59 underlying issuers yields...

Let us consider a portfolio made by a risky asset and cash. Any (individual) investor in such a portfolio is faced with two problems. She may ask about the possible returns whenever the asset relative change is expected to vary inside a given interval. Conversely, she might lead to determine the...

Following seminal works of Knight (1921) and Ellsberg (1961), we distinguish uncertainty from risk and examine the impact of aggregate uncertainty on return dynamics of size and book-to-market ratio sorted portfolios. Using VVIX as a proxy for aggregate uncertainty and controlling for market...

Because levered equity is an option on the firm, variations in asset idiosyncratic risk (ivol) induces a negative relationship between equity ivol and expected returns. We show that the effect is caused by the nonlinear payoff of equity and the law of one price, and is present in all but...

By means of a difference-in-differences approach (sigma-DID), we investigate the effect that hedging has on corporate risk. Examining the relation between hedging and the idiosyncratic variance of stock returns, we show that when new commodity derivatives are introduced in the Chicago Mercantile...