The education pillar of the Europe 2020 strategy: a convergence analysis

Empirica - In March 2010, the European Commission launched the Europe 2020 strategy ‘for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’ in the EU. Education is a major pillar of the Europe...     

Inequality and Unemployment Patterns in Europe: Does Integration Lead to (Real) Convergence?

The economic convergence criteria adopted in the Maastricht Treaty and the fiscal discipline of the Stability and Growth Pact enforced nominal convergence, leaving aside real convergence indicators. In this paper, we use cluster analysis to examine the convergence patterns of income inequality, absolute redistribution (a measure of governments’ effectiveness in correcting for inequality) and unemployment. The expected outcome after years of economic integration was, ex-ante, convergence to a single cluster. Our results, however, uncover a variety of groups, implying that economic integration has not led to real economic convergence. Moreover, the existence of different patterns suggests: (i) that traditional classifications (Anglo-Saxon, Continental European, European Periphery, and Nordic models) remain broadly valid; (ii) that there is no unemployment-inequality trade-off to be exploited in terms of economic policy; and (iii) that the redistributive capacity of governments plays a pivotal role in coping with inequality without negative effects in terms of unemployment.     

Liquidation equilibrium with seniority and hidden CDO

The aim of our paper is to price credit derivatives written on a single name when this name is a bank. Indeed, due to the special structure of the balance sheet of a bank and to the interconnections with other institutions of the financial system, the standard pricing formulas do not apply and their use can imply severe mispricing. The pricing of credit derivatives written on a single bank name requires a joint analysis of the risks of all banks directly or indirectly interconnected with the bank of interest. Each name cannot be priced in isolation, but the banking system must be treated as a whole. It is necessary to analyze the contagion of losses among banks, especially the equilibrium of joint defaults and recovery rates at liquidation time. We show the existence and uniqueness of such an equilibrium. Then the standard pricing formulas are modified by adding a premium to capture the contagion effects.     

Infrequent Extreme Risks

The main tools and concepts of financial and actuarial theory are designed to handle standard, or even small risks. The aim of this paper is to reconsider some selected financial problems, in a setup including infrequent extreme risks. We first consider investors maximizing the expected utility function of their future wealth, and we establish the necessary and sufficient conditions on the utility function to ensure the existence of a non degenerate demand for assets with extreme risks. This new class of utility functions, called LIRA, does not contain the classical HARA and CARA utility functions, which are not adequate in this framework. Then we discuss the corresponding asset supply-demand equilibrium model.     

International money and stock market contingent claims

We develop a unified approach with closed-form solutions for pricing bonds, stocks, currencies and their derivatives. The specification assumes a fundamental risk factor represented by a stochastic positive definite matrix following a Wishart autoregressive (WAR) process. By assuming a volatility-in-mean specification for the domestic stock returns and the relative changes of exchange rates, and a domestic stochastic discount factor exponential affine with respect to the fundamental risk, it is possible to derive closed form solutions for the term structures of interest rates and for the risk-neutral probabilities while keeping the flexibility of the model. In particular:

i) The domestic and foreign term structures are jointly affine and correspond to Wishart quadratic term structures, which can ensure the positivity of interest rates;

ii) In this framework where the stock price follows a model with stochastic volatility, we obtain explicit or quasi-explicit formulas for futures and forward contracts, swaps and options. This extends results by

Heston (1993)

and

Ball and Roma (1994)

.

DOMAIN RESTRICTIONS ON INTEREST RATES IMPLIED BY NO ARBITRAGE

This paper derives domain restrictions on interest rates implied by no‐arbitrage. These restrictions are important for the study of arbitrage opportunities on bond markets, for regulation of these markets, and for econometric modelling.     

Bilateral exposures and systemic solvency risk

Abstract By introducing a structure of the balance sheets of the banks, which takes into account their bilateral exposures in terms of stocks or lendings, we get a structural model for default analysis. This model allows us to distinguish the exogenous and endogenous default dependence. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the liquidation equilibrium, we study the consequences of exogenous shocks on the banking system and we measure contagion phenomena. This approach is illustrated by an application to the French banking system.     

Switching VARMA Term Structure Models

The purpose of this article is to propose a global discrete-timemodeling of the term structure of interest rates which is ableto capture simultaneously the following important features:(i) a historical dynamics of the factor driving term structureshapes involving several lagged values, and switching regimes;(ii) a specification of the stochastic discount factor (SDF)with time-varying and regime-dependent risk-premia; (iii) explicitor quasi explicit formulas for zero-coupon bond (ZCB) and interestrate derivative prices. We develop the switching autoregressivenormal (SARN) and the switching vector autoregressive normal(SVARN) Factor-Based Term Structure Models of order p. The factoris considered as a latent variable or an observable variable:in the second case the factor is a vector of several yields.Regime shifts are described by a Markov chain with (historical)nonhomogeneous transition probabilities. An empirical analysisof bivariate VAR(p) and SVARN(p) Factor-Based Term StructureModels, using monthly observations of the U.S. term structureof interest rates, and a goodness-of-fit and expectation hypothesispuzzle comparison with competing models in the literature, showsthe determinant role played by the observable nature of thefactor, lags, and switching regimes in the term structure modeling.     

Indirect inference

In this paper we present inference methods which are based on an ‘incorrect’ criterion, in the sense that the optimization of this criterion does not directly provide a consistent estimator of the parameter of interest. Moreover, the argument of the criterion, called the auxiliary parameter, may have a larger dimension than that of the parameter of interest. A second step, based on simulations, provides a consistent and asymptotically normal estimator of the parameter of interest. Various testing procedures are also proposed. The methods described in this paper only require that the model can be simulated, therefore they should be useful for models whose complexity rules out a direct approach. Various fields of applications are suggested (microeconometrics, finance, macroeconometrics).