This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of macro stress-testing methodologies. Substantial progress has been made both in the econometric analysis of financial soundness indicators and in the simulation of value-at-risk measures to assess system-wide vulnerabilities. However, a number of methodological challenges still remain concerning the correlation of market and credit risks over time and a...

The paper describes a general framework for contingent claim valuation for finance, insurance and general risk management. It considers security prices and portfolios with finite expected returns, where the growth optimal portfolio is taken as numeraire or benchmark. Benchmarked nonnegative wealth processes are shown to be supermartingales. Fair benchmarked values are conditional expectations o...

This paper proposes a consistent approach to the pricing of weather derivatives. Since weather derivatives are traded in an incomplete market setting, standard hedging based pricing methods cannot be applied. The growth optimal portfolio, which is interpreted as a world stock index, is used as a benchmark or numeraire such that all benchmarked derivative price processes are martingales. No meas...

This paper proposes an integrated approach to price weather derivatives based on the existence of an optimal benchmark portfolio for discrete time modelling. This portfolio, known as the growth optimal portfolio, when used as the numeraire ensures all benchmarked price processes are supermartingales. No further measure transformation is needed for the pricing of derivatives in a fair market, in...

This paper examines the dynamics of the linkages between Shanghai and Hong Kong stock indices. While the volatility linkage is analysed by a multivariate GARCH framework, the dependence of returns is examined by a copula approach. Eight different copula functions are applied in this study including two time varying ones which capture the time varying process of the linkage. The result shows sig...

This paper studies the adverse price effects of convergence trading. I assume two assets with identical cash flows traded in segmented markets. Initially, there is gap between the prices of the assets, because local traders face asymmetric temporary shocks. In the absence of arbitrageurs, the gap remains constant until a random time when the difference across local markets disappears. While arb...

In this paper we consider the estimation of Markov models where the transition density is unknown. The approach we propose is the empirical characteristic function (ECF) estimation procedure with an approximate optimal weight function. The approximate optimal weight function is obtained through an Edgeworth/Gram-Charlier expansion of the logarithmic transition density of the Markov process. Bas...

This paper combines a comprehensive sample of intraday firm-level news arrivals with high-frequency price movements of individual stocks, thereby decomposing daily stock returns into news-driven and non-news driven components. Consistent with prior literature, we find that non-news driven return precedes a reversal. For news-driven return, however, we find strong evidence of return continuation...

We study the lead±lag relationships among the spot, futures, and options markets on Hong KongÕs Hang Seng Index (HSI). The young options market experiences thin trading, and the option returns lag the cash index returns. The more mature futures market experiences active trading. Yet its lead over the cash index appears to be less than the counterparts in other countries. A possible reason is th...

In this paper we study how corporate bond defaults can be predicted using financial ratios and how the forecasted probability of default relates to the cross-section of expected stock returns. Using several performance measures we find that the duration model outperforms existing models in correctly classifying both Default and Non-Default firms. Using the default probabilities predicted by our...