This paper formulates and solves the selection problem for a portfolio of credit swaps. The problem is cast as a goal program that entails a constrained optimization of preference-weighted moments of the portfolio value at the investment horizon. The portfolio value takes account of the exact...

Financial institutions, government-sponsored enterprises, and asset-backed security in- vestors are often exposed to delinquency and prepayment risk from large numbers of loans. Examples include mortgages, credit cards, auto, student, and business loans. Due to the size of the pools, the...

We provide a simple and easy to use goodness-of-fit test for the misspecification of the volatility function in diffusion models. The test uses power variations constructed as functionals of discretely observed diffusion processes. We introduce an orthogonality condition which stabilizes the...

We develop a pivotal test to assess the statistical significance of the feature variables in a single-layer feedforward neural network regression model. We propose a gradient-based test statistic and study its asymptotics using nonparametric techniques. Under technical conditions, the limiting...

We consider the problem of optimally selecting a large portfolio of risky loans, such as mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans, or business loans. Examples include loan portfolios held by financial institutions and fixed-income investors as well as pools of loans backing mortgage-...

We analyze the optimal execution problem of a portfolio manager trading multiple assets. In addition to the liquidity and risk of each individual asset, we consider cross-asset interactions in these two dimensions, which substantially enriches the nature of the problem. Focusing on the market...

We prove a law of large numbers for the loss from default and use it for approximating the distribution of the loss from default in large, potentially heterogenous portfolios. The density of the limiting measure is shown to solve a non-linear stochastic PDE, and certain moments of the limiting...

We study the sources of corporate default clustering in the United States. We reject the hypothesis that firms' default times are correlated only because their conditional default rates depend on observable and latent systematic factors. By contrast, we find strong evidence that contagion,...

Collateralized debt obligations, which are are securities with payoffs that are tied to the cash flows in a portfolio of defaultable assets such as corporate bonds, play a significant role in the financial crisis that has spread throughout the world. Insufficient capital provisioning due to...

Credit risk is the distribution of financial loss due to a broken financial agreement, for example failure to pay interest or principal on a loan or bond. It pervades virtually all financial transactions, and therefore plays a significant role in financial markets. A credit derivative is a...