In this paper we discuss the potential for commercial microfinance in China. Particular emphasis is put on securitization of microloans and on structured microfinance in a China context. Three particular factors that we believe could support a strong growth in Chinese structured microfinance are...

This paper focuses on the many extreme credit default swap spread movements observed during the recent credit crisis and on how the tails of the spread (and price) change distribution significantly differ from those of the normal distribution even for diversified credit derivatives portfolios....

In this paper we employ the news aggregator GoogleTM News to demonstrate a strong link between the volatility in the stock market and the amount of news available to market participants. The paper also highlights some other areas, in finance and elsewhere, where news aggregators could be useful.

This paper looks at the asset correlation bias resulting from firms' assets and liabilities being denominated in different currencies. It focuses on the time-variation in the bias and on the dependency of the bias on currency movements. Both the volatility of the exchange rate and the...

This study discusses how to compute and forecast long-term stock return volatilities, typically with a 5-year horizon or longer, using credit derivatives, and how such volatilities can be used in different areas ranging from the valuation of employee stock options and other long-term derivatives...

I use Google News TM to study the relation between news volumes and stock market volatilities. More than nine million stock market-related news stories in English and (Mandarin) Chinese are collected and the dynamics of the news volume and the stock market volatility is compared in both the...

We show how one can back out implied forward volatility term structures from credit default swap spreads. Such forward stock volatility term structures are useful for instance in forward start option pricing. We find the term structure to be downward-sloping, and the credit market's volatility...

We extend the Tasche (2007) model on the asset correlation bias caused by a currency mismatch between assets and liabilities to the more realistic situation where some assets, and some, but not necessarily all, liabilities, are denominated in a foreign currency. To test the significance of the...

In this paper we compute long-term stock return expectations (across the business cycle) for individual firms using information backed out from the credit derivatives market. Our methodology builds on previous theoretical results in the literature on stock return expectations and, empirically,...

We look at the link between the volatility in the Bitcoin market and the volatility in other related traditional markets, i.e. the gold, currency and stock market. We also try to answer if the volatility in the Bitcoin market can be explained by retail investor-driven internet search volumes or,...