Understanding the nature of credit risk has important implications for financial stability. Since authorities notably, central banks focus on risks that have systemic implications, it is crucial to develop ways to measure these risks. The difficulty lies in finding reliable measures of aggregate...

This paper applies regression analysis to investigate the fundamental factors of the variation of CDS index tranches. The sample comprises daily data on the tranche premia of the European iTraxx and North American CDX index from the start of the market in summer 2004 to January 2008. I estimate...

This paper presents some new results on the price discovery process in both the Canadian and U.S. 10-year Government bond markets using high-frequency data not previously analyzed. Using techniques introduced by Hasbrouck (1995) and Gonzalo-Granger (1995), we look at the relative information...

We develop a discrete-time stochastic volatility option pricing model, which exploits the information contained in high-frequency data. The Realized Volatility (RV) is used as a proxy of the unobservable log-returns volatility. We model its dynamics by a simple but effective (pseudo) long memory...

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...

We develop a structural bond pricing approach and implement it on a large panel of US industrial bonds using an efficient maximum likelihood methodology. We evaluate the model's ability to predict yield spread levels and changes out-of-sample. Errors are smaller and distinctly less variable than...

Theory says an American call should never be exercised early, except possibly just before an ex-dividend date. But the best market bid is frequently below intrinsic value for an in-the-money short maturity option. An American option can always be exercised to recover intrinsic value, while...

We study the predictive power of option-implied moment risk premia embedded in theconventional variance risk premium. We find that while the second moment risk premiumpredicts market returns in short horizons with positive coefficients, the third (fourth)moment risk premium predicts market...