EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

2245. Pricing of synthetic CDOs with infectious defaults and market based measures of systemic risk

Invited abstract in session TD-7: Quantitative methods for systemic and climate risk, stream Risk Management in Commodities and Financial Markets .

Tuesday, 14:30-16:00
Room: Clarendon GR.01

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Gabriele Torri
Management, Economics and Quantitative Methods, University of Bergamo
2. Rosella Giacometti
Management, Economics and Quantitative Methods, University of Bergamo
3. Gianluca Farina
University of Bergamo

Abstract

A vast literature that studied the pricing of synthetic CDOs flourished in the first decade of the 00s due to the expansion of the market of CDOs and other complex credit derivatives. The relevance of CDO-type contracts and the correct estimation of the probability of joint defaults is still relevant today. Indeed, the market perception of joint default correlations implied by such contracts is valuable to regulators and practitioners interested in assessing systemic risk and financial contagion.
We introduce a model for the loss distribution of a credit portfolio considering a contagion mechanism for the default of names which is the result of two independent components: an infection attempt generated by defaulting entities and a failed defence from healthy ones. We then propose an efficient recursive algorithm for the loss distribution. Then we extend the framework with a more flexible mixture distribution to better fit real-world data.
In the empirical analysis, we calibrate the model on the CDO tranches of the iTraxx index, and we use the information embedded in the market prices of CDOs as market based measures of systemic risk.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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