"Arbitrage CDOs" have recorded an explosive growth during the years before the outbreak of the financial crisis. In the present paper we discuss potential sources of such arbitrage opportunities, in particular arbitrage gains due to mispricing. For this purpose we examine the risk profiles of...

This paper investigates predictions of structural credit risk models for interest rate sensitivities of corporate bond returns. Recent evidence has shown that the existing models fail to capture this sensitivity (a stylized fact referred to as the interest rate sensitivity puzzle). We propose...

In almost every financial market crisis we can observe widening credit spreads, especially in the last years during the subprime and sovereign debt crisis. But what exactly drives the credit spread? This paper will outline static components, i.e. default risk, liquidity, risk and the relative...

We introduce a novel class of credit risk models in which the drift of the survival process of a firm is a linear function of the factors. The prices of defaultable bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) are linear-rational in the factors. The price of a CDS option can be uniformly approximated by...

The goal of this paper is to explore the model risk inherent in the rating and design of structured finance products. We seek to illustrate the consequences of neglecting state-dependent correlations on the methodologies and criteria employed by the major ratings agencies. In contrast to related...

This paper analyses the pricing of systematic risk factors in credit default swap contracts in a two-stage empirical framework. In the first pass, we estimate contract-specific sensitivities to several systematic risk factors by time-series regressions using quoted credit default swap (CDS)...