Fourth Quarter (2005)

Mark Rubinstein Volume 3, Number 4, Fourth Quarter 2005 This is the fourth in a series of articles in this Journal examining the historical origins of key ideas in the history of financial economics. The fundamental theorem asserts: there are no arbitrage opportunities if and only if state-prices exist. Like Newton’s laws of motion, though… Read more

Thomas S. Y. Ho and Blessing Mudavanhu Volume 3, Number 4, Fourth Quarter 2005 The market of variable annuities has grown tremendously in recent years and has become a significant part of our capital markets. These equity and interest rate structured products offer a broad range of guarantees, whose risks are typically borne by the… Read more

Navneet Arora, Jeffrey R. Bohn and Fanlin Zhu Volume 3, Number 4, Fourth Quarter In this paper, we empirically compare two structural models (basic Merton and Vasicek- Kealhofer (VK)) and one reduced-form model (Hull-White (HW)) of credit risk. We propose here that two useful purposes for credit models are default discrimination and relative value analysis… Read more

Fan Yu Volume 3, Number 4, Fourth Quarter 2005 Reduced-form models have proven to be a useful tool for analyzing the dynamics of credit spreads. However, some have recently questioned their ability to match the level of empirical default correlation. The key concern appears to be the assumption that defaults are independent conditional on the… Read more

David Lando and Allan Mortensen Volume 3, Number 4, Fourth Quarter 2005 The term structure of interest rates contains information about the market’s expectations of the direction of future interest rates. Similarly, the term structure of credit spreads contains information about the market’s perception of future credit spreads. The term structure of credit spreads is… Read more