We assess the predictive ability of 15 economic uncertainty measures in a real-time out-of-sample forecasting exercise for the quantiles of The Conference Board's coincident economic index and its components (industrial production, employment, personal income, and manufacturing and trade sales)....

We propose an affi ne two-factor model for the pricing of single-tranche collateralized debt obligations by following the general top-down framework introduced in Filipovic et al. [2011]. Apart from being analytically tractable, this model has the feature that it incorporates a catastrophic risk...