Common ways to mitigate the detrimental consequences of supplier bankruptcies are to install redundancy and to pursue a multiple-sourcing strategy. This is based on the assumption that the adverse event of one supplier going out of business is largely independent from the default of other...

This paper investigates the variance minimizing currency forward hedge of an exporting firm that is exposed to different sources of risk. In an empirical study, we quantify the corresponding hedge ratios of a "typical" German firm for different hedge horizons. Based on cointegrated vector...

Many firms face product price risk in foreign currency, uncertain costs in home currency and exchange rate risk. If prices and exchange rates in different countries interact, natural hedges of foreign exchange risk might result. If the effectiveness of such hedges depends on the hedge horizon,...

Firms that export goods face risks such as product price, cost, and exchange rate risks. Price and cost risks can substantially reduce the FX hedging performance in real wealth. We thus investigate hedging strategies that are intended to improve the performance of the FX hedge in real terms...

This paper presents an analytical and empirical analysis of a parsimonious model framework that accounts for a dependence of bond and bank loan recoveries on systematic risk. We extend the single risk factor model by assuming that the recovery rates also depend on this risk factor and follow a...

Results from portfolio models for credit risk tell us that loan concentration in certain industry sectors can substantially increase the value-at-risk (VaR). The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether a tractable "infection model" can provide a meaningful estimate of the impact of...

The purpose of this paper is to measure the potential impact of business-sector concentration on economic capital for loan portfolios and to explore a tractable model for its measurement. The empirical part evaluates the increase in economic capital in a multi-factor asset value model for...

In credit risk modelling, the correlation of unobservable asset returns is a crucial component for the measurement of portfolio risk. In this paper, we estimate asset correlations from monthly time series of Moody's KMV asset values for around 2,000 European firms from 1996 to 2004. We compare...

This paper sets out to help explain why estimates of asset correlations based on equity prices tend to be considerably higher than estimates based on default rates. Resolving this empirical puzzle is highly important because, firstly, asset correlations are a key driver of credit risk and,...