The Global Financial Crisis had a severe impact on the commodity markets on top of the well-known effects on the worldwide economy. Not only the demand for commodities decreased severely thereby hurting the creditworthiness of participants in the wholesale commodity markets, but also the...

Trading volumes in credit default swaps (CDS) have fallen by more than 75% since the 2008 financial crisis to less than $9 trillion notional amount outstanding as of June 2015. This dramatic decline in volumes comes, in part, because of new laws and regulations focused on reducing the risk of...

If the creditworthiness of a counterparty is a derivative of a commodity price, there is the potential to have right- or wrong-way exposures in respective commodity transaction. Identifying them is important, because otherwise credit costs might be inadequately calculated and wrong incentives...

I provide a measure of time-varying tail risk in credit markets based on a dynamic power-law model. Credit tail risk is estimated from extreme price fluctuations of credit default swaps (CDS) on government debt. Tail returns are described by a power-law for core and peripheral countries within...

Mortgage underwriting process that sorts heterogeneous borrowers into different risk groups according to observable characteristics of borrowers does not reveal sufficient information to segregate pooling risks in mortgages. Do borrowers always choose rationally mortgage contracts that minimize...

The paper studies the relationship between financial liberalization, characterized by removing entry restrictions, and bank loan quality. It shows that if a banking market is liberalized, the opportunity cost of screening loan applicants is driven lower by competition. Thus, a bank facing an...

This paper studies the effect of banking deregulation on credit risk. Its theoretical model shows that a bank is willing to invest more resources in screening borrowers when there is an entry threat, even though loan rates are driven lower. Thus, deregulation may result in improved loan quality...

This paper models competition among credit rating agencies as an auction. Equilibrium ratings give a distorted representation of agencies' true assessment of quality, because the agencies choose their ratings strategically. I quantify the distortion in ratings for individual commercial...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...