By reinterpreting the calibration of structural models, a reassessment of the importance of the input variables is undertaken. The analysis shows that volatility is the key parameter to any calibration exercise, by several orders of magnitude. To maximize the sensitivity to volatility, a simple...

We propose a simple but practical methodology for the quantification of correlation risk in the context of credit derivatives pricing and credit valuation adjustment (CVA), where the correlation between rates and credit is often uncertain or unmodelled. We take the rates model to be Hull-White...

We study the risk of holding credit default swaps (CDS) in the trading book. In particular, we compare the Value at Risk (VaR) of a CDS position to the VaR for investing in the respective firm's equity. Our sample consists of CDS – stock price pairs for 86 actively traded firms over the period...

By reinterpreting the calibration of structural models, a reassessment of the importance of the input variables is undertaken. The analysis shows that volatility is the key parameter to any calibration exercise, by several orders of magnitude. To maximize the sensitivity to volatility, a simple...

We study risk and return properties of capital structure arbitrage strategies aiming to profit from temporal mispricing between equity and credit default swaps (CDSs) of companies. We find that capital structure arbitrage provides an attractive annualized return of 24.35% on invested capital....