We investigate the term structure of sovereign yield spreads for five advanced economies against the US and provide novel insights on the key drivers of the term structure. We show that the spread term structure dynamics are driven by three latent factors, which can be labeled as spread level,...

We investigate the forecasting performance of popular dynamic factor models of the yield curve after the global financial crisis (GFC). This time period is characterized by an unprecedented low and non-volatile interest rate environment in most major economies. We focus on the dynamic...

This paper provides an overview on classical and new methods for testing time series properties of migration matrices. It is well known that due to cyclical behaviour of the economy transition matrices for many credit portfolios cannot be considered to be constant through time. Further,...

The recently finalized Basel II Capital Accord requires banks to adopt a procedure to estimate the operational risk capital charge. Under the Advanced Measurement Approaches, that are currently mandated for all large internationally active US banks, require the use of historic operational loss...

Financial contagion and systemic risk measures are commonly derived from conditional quantiles by using imposed model assumptions such as a linear parametrization. In this paper, we provide model free measures for contagion and systemic risk which are independent of the specifcation of...