I present an analytical valuation framework for the management of fixed-income instruments traded in imperfectly competitive markets, like demand deposits and credit card loans in the banking book, inter alia, to stabilize the abnormal profit margin. Banking book instruments contain embedded...

Low key rates hurt the profits of deposit-taking institutions in a differentiated Bertrand game if there is neither a tax on banknotes, nor a limit on its quantity, nor a reduction of its quality. By making the electronic dollar the unit of account and taxing paper currency, the central bank can...

In this paper, we study the economic benefits from using credit scoring models. We contribute to the literature by relating the discriminatory power of a credit scoring model to the optimal credit decision. Given the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve of the credit scoring model, we...

The financial market crisis has exposed a weakness in predicting defaults. A new wave of models must be more powerful and should be more successful in predicting multiple defaults. I argue that such models incorporate signal strength, cross and serial dependencies. The conditional default...

Well performing default predictions show good discrimination and calibration. Discrimination is the ability to separate defaulters from non-defaulters. Calibration is the ability to make unbiased forecasts. We derive novel discrimination and calibration statistics to verify forecasts expressed...

The relation between physical probabilities (rating) and risk-neutral probabilities (pricing) is derived in a large market with a quasi-factor structure. Factor sensitivities and default probabilities can be estimated for all kinds of credits on historical rating data. Since factor prices are...

We develop a new goodness-of-fit test for validating the performance of probability forecasts. Our test statistic is particularly powerful under sparseness and dependence in the observed data. To build our test statistic, we start from a formal definition of calibrated forecasts, which we...

Measures of volatility implied in option prices are widely believed to be the best available volatility forecasts. In this paper, we examine the information content and predictive power of implied standard deviations derived from EUREX options on the Swiss market index (SMI). Implied...

A credit rating system in which the number of observed defaults aligns well with the number of defaults expected by the system demonstrates good calibration. I derive new goodness-of-fit statistics to test the calibration hypothesis over several observation periods and I therefore solve the...

We present a coherent management framework for non-maturity accounts to derive the hedging strategy from the marketing strategy to generate stable net interest income. Our framework consists of three building blocks: (1) a discrete-time dynamic term structure model for the evolution of interest...