Asymmetric volatility in equity markets has been widely documented in finance, where two competing explanations, as considered in Bekaert and Wu (2000), are the financial leverage and the volatility feedback hypothesis. We explicitly test for the role of both hypotheses in explaining extreme...

Dependence is an important issue in credit risk portfolio modeling and pricing. We discuss a straightforward common factor model of credit risk dependence, which is motivated by intensity models such as Duffie and Singleton (1998), among others. In the empirical analysis, we study dependence...