With the recent development of the European debt crisis, traditional index bond management has been severely called into question. We focus here on the risk issues raised by the classical market-capitalization weighting scheme. We propose an approach to properly measure sovereign credit risk in...

In this paper we propose a framework for measuring and stress testing the systemic risk of a group of major financial institutions. The systemic risk is measured by the price of insurance against financial distress, which is based on ex ante measures of default probabilities of individual banks...

Collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) are a key tool for managing the credit risk of corporate loan portfolios. Along with credit default swaps (CDSs), CLOs are the primary means of transferring credit risk from a bank loan portfolio to third-party investors without jeopardizing customer...

This study analyzes the motives for and consequences of funds' credit default swap (CDS) investments using mutual funds' quarterly holdings from pre- to post-financial crisis. Funds resort to CDS investment when facing unpredictable liquidity needs. Funds sell more in reference entities where...

Structured products like collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) tend to offer significantly higher yield spreads than corporate bonds with the same rating. At the same time, empirical evidence does not indicate that this higher yield is reduced by higher default losses of CLOs. The evidence thus...