What determines the sustainability of sovereign debt? In this paper, we develop a model where myopic governments seek electoral popularity but can nevertheless commit credibly to service external debt. They do not default when they are poor even though default costs are low because they would lose access to debt markets and be forced to reduce spending; they do not default when they become rich...

The aim of this paper is to use copulas functions to capture the different structures of dependency when we deal with portfolios of dependent credit risks and a basket of credit derivatives. We first present the wellknown result for the pricing of default risk, when there is only one defaultable firm. After that, we expose the structure of dependency with copulas in pricing dependent credit der...

We postulate a new method of measuring debt which we call the debt burden (DB). We claim that DB reveals the true debt obligations of the fiscal authority by taking the intertemporal debt obligations of the government into account. It is more accurate and more transparent than the currently used methods of assessing debt. DB is calculated on a daily basis and it clearly identifies debt risks. I...

Modelling the dynamics of credit derivatives is a challenging task in finance and economics. The recent crisis has shown that the standard market models fail to measure and forecast financial risks and their characteristics. This work studies risk of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) by investigating the evolution of tranche spread surfaces and base correlation surfaces using a dynamic sem...

: Collateralized debt obligatons (CDOs) constitute an important subclass of asset backed securities. The evaluation of CDOs relies on mathematical modeling and on simulation as well as analytic and semi-analytic approaches, depending on the underlying asset pool and the cash flow structure of the transaction. This paper is an introductory survey on CDO modeling. It starts with a ‘mini course’ o...

I conduct an empirical investigation into the pricing of subprime asset-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and their contagion effects on other markets. Using data for the ABX subprime indexes, I find strong evidence of contagion in the financial markets. The results support the hypothesis that financial contagion was propagated primarily through liquidity and risk-premium channels, ...

In recent years the financial world has seen an increasing demand for faster risk simulations, driven by increasing contract complexity and client portfolio growth. Traditionally many financial models employ Monte-Carlo simulation, which can take excessively long to compute in software. Hence, commonly a hardware accelerator is sought out. This thesis focuses on accelerating structured financia...

This paper uses distortions of the bivariate Gaussian copula to produce a heavy tail for expected portfolio loss distribution in the context of synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). We demonstrate that when the distorted copulas are used within the JP Morgan CDO pricing formula, as an example, we can simulate quite realistic tranche prices. Furthermore, we need only one dependence p...

Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) are sophisticated financial products that offer a range of investments, known as tranches, at varying risk levels backed by a collateral pool typically consisting of corporate debt (bonds, loans, default swaps, etc.). The analysis of the risk-return properties of CDO tranches is complicated by the highly nonlinear and time dependent relationship between th...

This paper provides a general framework for doubly stochastic term structure models for portfolio of credits, such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). We introduce the defaultable (T, x)-bonds, which pay one if the aggregated loss process in the underlying pool of the CDO has not exceeded x at maturity T , and zero else. Necessary and sufficient conditions on the stochastic term structur...