Search

This review provides formal definitions of the terms credit value adjustment (CVA) and debt value adjustment (DVA). Estimating these quantities requires modeling the probabilities of default and the loss given default, recognizing the dependence structure among all these inputs. In practice, marginal distributions are used and a copula function assumed. Although it has long been known that different copula functions can produce very different price estimates, keeping marginal distributions constant, there is little empirical evidence about the appropriate form of function to use for modeling default dependence. This review discusses the use of collateral for risk mitigation and its effects on CVA. Regulators have argued that standardized contracts should be cleared through central counterparties (CCPs). However, there are arguments against CCPs.

This review illustrates the interaction between law and finance in the particular case of the taxation of constructive sales. The focus is on the treatment of variable prepaid forward contracts and the rules regarding these instruments articulated by Revenue Ruling 2003-7 and the recent case involving Philip Anschutz ( Anschutz Co. et al. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue 2011 ). Simple models are used to show how the tests established by the law fail to reflect important financial considerations, such as the volatility of asset returns and the riskiness of dividend payments. These models provide examples that form the basis for a critique of the current rules and also indicate a possible path for future reform and improvement of the law, namely the addition of a delta-based test to the existing rules. The analysis presented here aims to encourage future work that applies financial theory to critique and improve legal rules in a wide range of other situations.

Credit default swaps (CDSs) are term insurance contracts written on traded bonds. This review studies the economics of CDSs using the economics of insurance literature as a basis for analysis. It is alleged that trading in CDSs caused the 2007 credit crisis, and therefore trading CDSs is an evil that needs to be eliminated or controlled. In contrast, I argue that the trading of CDSs is welfare increasing because it facilitates a more optimal allocation of risks in the economy. To perform this function, however, the risk of the CDS seller's failure needs to be minimized. In this regard, government regulation imposing stricter collateral requirements and higher equity capital for CDS traders needs to be introduced.

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both domestic and global risk factors. Further, local investors tend to overweight their asset portfolios in local equity. The stock prices of firms that begin to trade across borders increase in response to this information. Foreign exchange markets also display anomalous relationships. The forward rate predicts the wrong sign of future movements in the exchange rate, implying that traders can make profits by borrowing at lower interest rate currencies and investing in higher interest rate currencies. Furthermore, the sign of the foreign exchange premium changes over time, a fact difficult to reconcile with consumption variability. In this review, I describe the implications of the current body of research for addressing these and other global asset pricing challenges.

Periodically, the global economy experiences great commodity booms and busts, characterized by a broad and sharp comovement of commodity prices. There have been two such episodes since the Korean War. The first event peaked in 1974 and the second in 2008, 34 years apart. Both created major economic and political shocks, including fallen governments and human suffering due to high food prices. Each occurrence raised serious concerns over food and energy security and led to more government intervention in the commodity markets. Although there is no simple explanation for what causes such complex events, they do share similar characteristics. We find at the core of these cycles a set of contemporaneous supply and demand surprises that coincided with low inventories and that were magnified by macroeconomic shocks and policy responses. In the next few decades, the world faces the prospect of continued increases in the demand for commodities and greater uncertainty about supply. However, because market participants are likely to respond by increasing inventory holdings and investing in new technologies, we see no reason to expect an increase in the frequency of dramatic commodity booms and busts.

Modern risk management systems were developed in the early 1990s to provide centralized risk measures at the top level of financial institutions. These are based on a century of theoretical developments in risk measures. In particular, value at risk (VAR) has become widely used as a statistical measure of market risk based on current positions. This methodology has been extended to credit risk and operational risk. This article reviews the benefits and limitations of these models. In spite of all these advances, risk methods are poorly adapted to measure liquidity risk and systemic risk.

This article surveys recent developments to estimate and test continuous-time models in finance using discrete observations on the underlying asset price or derivative securities' prices. Both parametric and nonparametric methods are described. All these methods share a common focus on the transition density as the central object for inference and testing of the model.