A recent trend in the German Asset Backed Securities (ABS) market is the securitisation of subordinated loans and profit participation agreements (PPAs) granted to medium-sized enterprises (MEs). This paper provides an overview of this growing market and analyses the benefits of such...

The strong growth in collateralized debt obligation transactions raises the question how these transactions are designed. The originator designs the transaction so as to maximize her benefit subject to requirements imposed by investors and rating agencies. An important issue in these...

We present a necessary and sufficient condition on an agent's utility function for a simple mean preserving spread in an independent background risk to increase the agent's risk aversion (incremental risk vulnerability). Gollier and Pratt (1996) have shown that declining and convex risk aversion...

We examine the effects of non-portfolio risks on optimal portfolio choice. Examples of non-portfolio risks include, among others, uncertain labor income, uncertainty about the terminal value of fixed assets such as housing and uncertainty about future tax liabilities. In particular, while some...

The Black-Scholesmodelis basedona one-parameter pricingkernel with constantelasticity. Theoretical and empirical results suggest declining elasticity and, hence, a pricing kernel withat leasttwo parameters.We price European-style optionson assets whose probability distributions have two unknown...

This paper contributes to the economics of financial institutions risk management by exploring how loan securitization a.ects their default risk, their systematic risk, and their stock prices. In a typical CDO transaction a bank retains through a first loss piece a very high proportion of the...

Securitization is a financial innovation that experiences a boom-bust cycle, as many other innovations before. This paper analyzes possible reasons for the breakdown of primary and secondary securitization markets, and argues that misaligned incentives along the value chain are the primary cause...

Die Vorstellung selbst-stabilisierender, zum Gleichgewicht tendierender Finanzmärkte, lange Zeit als Selbstverständlichkeit angesehen, ist durch die aktuelle Banken- und Kreditkrise in Frage gestellt. Trotz ausgefeilten Risikomanagements der Banken und einer an Basel II orientierten Aufsicht...

We consider random wealth of the multiplicative form xy, where x and y are statistically independent random variables. We assume that x is endogenous to the economic agent, but that y is an exogenous and uninsurable background risk. Our main focus is on how the randomness of y affects...