Most existing credit default theories do not link causes directly to the effect of default and are unable to evaluate credit risk in a rapidly changing market environment, as experienced in the recent mortgage and credit market crisis. Causal theories of credit default are needed to understand...

Using the martingale approach we find sufficient conditions for exponential boundedness of first passage times over a level for ergodic first order autoregressive sequences (AR(1)). Further, we prove a martingale identity and use it for obtaining explicit bounds for the expectation of exit times.

We focus on changes in the multivariate distribution of index returns stemming purely from varying the return interval, assuming daily to quarterly returns. Whereas longtailedness is present in daily returns, we find that, in agreement with a well-established idea, univariate return...

Considering the increasingly international banks of today, the health of a country's banking sector is crucial not only to the country's growth and prosperity but also to the rest of the international financial community. Early warning signals of a banking sector in trouble or a pending banking...

This paper proposes a new test based on a Fourier series expansion to approximate the unknown functional form of a nonlinear time-series model. The test specifically allows for structural breaks, seasonal parameters and time-varying parameters. The test is shown to have evry good size and power...

We show that the effectiveness of transaction taxes depends on the market microstructure. Within our model, heterogeneous traders use a blend of technical and fundamental trading strategies to determine their orders. In addition, they may turn inactive if the profitability of trading decreases....

In this paper we consider the fourth moment structure of a class of first-order Exponential GARCH models. This class contains as special cases both the standard Exponential GARCH model and the symmetric and asymmetric Logarithmic GARCH one. Conditions for the existence of any arbitrary moment...

We develop a non-dynamic panel smooth transition regression model with fixed individual effects. The model is useful for describing heterogenous panels, with regression coefficients that vary across individuals and over time. Heterogeneity is allowed for by assuming that these coefficients are...

We consider models for stock prices which relates to random processes with independent homogeneous increments (Levy processes). These models are arbitrage free but correspond to the incomplete financial market. There are many different approaches for pricing of financial derivatives. We consider...

Modelling and forecasting the volatile spot pricing process for electricity presents a number of challenges. For increasingly deregulated electricity markets, like that in the Australian state of New South Wales, there is need to price a range of derivative securities used for hedging. Any...