This paper develops an arbitrage approach to pricing insurance bonds that bear currency risk. Bondholders are shown to have a short position on path-dependent digital options written on risk-tracking indices. It implements the technique of forward-neutral change of numeraire and comes down to...

This paper determines first passage time distributions with a two-fold emphasis. The focus is first set on interest rate randomness. It derives a closed-form solution in the case of moving boundaries, indexed on risk-free bonds, and where interest rates obey mean-reverting processes and...

This paper studies banking liquidity crises under the assumption that the government may have private benefits in bailing-out a collapsing banking sector for reputation concerns. This political distortion feeds political uncertainty, as citizens may not agree with a bailout decision and...

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 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...