A common feature of financial time series is their strong persistence. Yet, long memory may just be the spurious effect of either structural breaks or slow switching regimes. So far, five testing procedures have been proposed to distinguish between true and spurious long memory. The tests are...

Svenja Hager aims at pricing non-standard illiquid portfolio credit derivatives which are related to standard CDO tranches with the same underlying portfolio of obligors. Instead of assuming a homogeneous dependence structure between the default times of different obligors, as it is assumed in...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...