This paper highlights the spread of banking panics across countries, as the public reassesses governments' propensity to bailouts. Policymakers decide whether to rescue a failing banking sector, by weighing the costs of a collapse against the costs associated with raising taxes to finance a...

This paper shows that pricing catastrophe bonds boils down to computing first-passage time distributions of jump-diffusion processes. It derives a generic valuation expression by assuming that the jump risk is not systematic and then performs simulations, which can stress the sensitivity of...

Cronyism provides policymakers with marked incentives to repay sovereign debt. This takes place at the expense of the average citizen who bears both steep costs of debt repudiation and high costs of debt service, as clientelism increases both financial fragility and the debt burden. The paper...

This paper highlights the spread of bank panics across countries, as the public reassesses governments' propensity to bailouts. Policymakers decide whether to save collapsing banking systems by weighing social costs of crises against the costs associated with raising taxes to finance rescue...

This paper reports fairly accurate simulations of insurance-linked securities within an arbitrage-free framework, while accounting for catastrophic events and allowing for stochastic interest rates. Assessing these contingent claims exhibits features of instability rooted in the discontinuity of...

This paper tailors Monte Carlo simulations to the scope of binary options whose underlying dynamics obey jump-diffusion or jump-mean-reverting processes and may not be traded. In the process, we justify the existence of well-defined arbitrage prices notwithstanding a framework of incomplete...