The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

In this paper we consider the optimal stopping problem for general dynamic monetary utility functionals. Sufficient conditions for the Bellman principle and the existence of optimal stopping times are provided. Particular attention is payed to representations which allow for a numerical...

Equity basket correlation is an important risk factor. It characterizes the strength of linear dependence between assets and thus measures the degree of portfolio diversification. It can be estimated both under the physical measure from return series, and under the risk neutral measure from...

Credit risk refers to the risk of incurring losses due to unexpected changes in the credit quality of a counterparty or issuer. In this paper we give an introduction to the modeling of credit risks and the valuation of credit-risky securities. We consider individual as well as correlated credit...

Faced with the problem of pricing complex contingent claims, investors seek to make their valuations robust to model uncertainty. We construct a notion of a modeluncertainty-induced utility function and show that model uncertainty increases investors' effective risk aversion. Using this utility...

This paper decomposes the risk premia of individual stocks into contributions from systematic and idiosyncratic risks. I introduce an affine jump-diffusion model, which accounts for both the factor structure of asset returns and that of the variance of idiosyncratic returns. The estimation is...

This study uses a comprehensive data set of VIX and CDS markets to propose pairs trading strategies that represent the dynamic relation between market risk and credit risk in an equilibrium framework with a common non stationary factor. This involves the analysis of price discovery between VIX...

Using a novel data set and new proxies for rollover losses and market illiquidity, this paper finds that market illiquidity affects corporate bond spreads beyond a liquidity premium through a “rollover risk channel”. This effect is economically significant during episodes of market...

In this paper we introduce a discrete time pricing model for a European call option when the log-return of the underlying stock (asset) is subject to discontinuous market regime type of shifts in its mean or volatility whose risk can be priced in the market. The paper shows how to estimate this...