Due to their status as "the" benchmark yield for the world's largest government bond market and its importance for US monetary policy, the interest in a "good" forecast of the constant maturity yield of the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond ("T-bond yields") is immense. This paper assesses three...

The risk of a credit portfolio depends crucially on correlations between latent covariates, for instance the probability of default (PD) in different economic sectors. Often, correlations have to be estimated from relatively short time series, and the resulting estimation error hinders the...

This paper introduces a test for zero correlation in situations where the correlation matrix is large compared to the sample size. The test statistic is the sum of the squared correlation coefficients in the sample. We derive its limiting null distribution as the number of variables as well as...

For a time-continuous discrete-state Markov process as model for rating transitions, we study the time-stationarity by means of a likelihood ratio test. For multiple Markov process data from a multiplicative intensity model, maximum likelihood parameter estimates can be represented as martingale...

In nonparametric curve estimation, the smoothing parameter is critical for performance. In order to estimate the hazard rate, we compare nearest neighbor selectors that minimize the quadratic, the Kullback-Leibler, and the uniform loss. These measures result in a rule of thumb, a...

Almost sure convergence for ratios of delta functions establishes global and local strong consistency for a variety of estimates and data generations. For instance, the empirical probability function from independent identically distributed random vectors, the empirical distribution for...

The time-continuous discrete-state Markov process is a model for rating transitions. One parameter, namely the intensity to migrate to an adjacent rating state, implies an ordinal rating to have an intuitive metric. State-specific intensities generalize the state-stationarity. Observing Markov...

The risk of a credit portfolio depends crucially on correlations between the prob- ability of default (PD) in different economic sectors. Often, PD correlations have to be estimated from relatively short time series of default rates, and the resulting estimation error hinders the detection of a...

In nonparametric curve estimation the decision about the type of smoothing parameter is critical for the practical performance. The nearest neighbor bandwidth as introduced by Gefeller and Dette 1992 for censored data in survival analysis is specified by one parameter, namely the number of...