nep-rmg New Economics Papers
on Risk Management
Issue of 2005‒11‒09
two papers chosen by
Stan Miles
York University

  1. Persistence Characteristics of the Chinese Stock Markets By Cornelis A. Los; Bing Yu
  2. From Fault Tree to Credit Risk Assessment: A Case Study By Hayette GATFAOUI

  1. By: Cornelis A. Los (EMEPS Associates, Inc.); Bing Yu (Kent State University, Graduate School of Management)
    Abstract: This paper identifies such fundamental characteristics as the lack of ergodicity, stationarity, and independence, and it identifies the degree of initial persistence of the Chinese stock markets when they were more regulated. The index series are from the Shanghai (SHI) stock market and Shenzhen A-shares (SZI) and B-shares (SZBI) stock markets, before and after the various deregulations and reregulations. Accurate and complete signal processing methods are applied to the complete series and to their sub-periods. The evidence of lack of stationarity and ergodicity can be ascribed to two causes: (1) the initial interventions in these stock markets by the Chinese government by imposing various daily price change limits, and (2) the changing trading styles in the course of the development of these emerging stock markets, after the Chinese government left these equity markets to develop by themselves. By computing the markets' monofractal Hurst exponents (and its accuracy range with a new statistic), using wavelet multiresolution analysis (MRA), we identify the markets' subsequent degrees of persistence. The empirical evidence shows that SHI, SZI, and SZBI are moderately persistent with Hurst exponents slightly greater than the Fickian 0.5 of the Geometric Brownian Motion. It also shows that these stock markets were considerably more persistent before the deregulations, but that they now move much more like geometric Brownian motions, i.e., efficiently. Our results also show that the Chinese stock markets are gradually and properly integrating into one Chinese stock market. Our results are consistent with similar empirical findings from Latin American, European, and other Asian emerging financial markets.
    Keywords: Long-term dependence, degrees of persistence, Hurst exponent, wavelet multiresolution analysis, Chinese equity markets
    JEL: C15 C33 C53 G13 G15 G18
    Date: 2005–08–16
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wpa:wuwpfi:0508008&r=rmg
  2. By: Hayette GATFAOUI (Rouen School of Management)
    Abstract: Reliability has been largely applied to industrial systems in order to study the various possibilities of systems’ failure. The goal is to establish the chain of events leading to any system’s failure, namely the top event. Looking for the minimal paths leading to any system’s fault allows for a better control of systems’ safety. To this end, reliability is composed of a static approach (see Ngom et al. [1999] for example) as well as a dynamic approach (see Reory & Andrews [2003] for example). In this paper, we extend the framework stated by Gatfaoui (2003) allowing for the application of fault tree theory to credit risk assessment. The author explains that fault tree is one alternative approach of reliability, which matches default risk analysis in a simple framework. Our extension includes other distributions of probability to model the lifetimes of French firms while studying the related empirical default probabilities. We use mainly, but not exclusively, continuous distributions for which the exponential law used by Gatfaoui (2003) constitutes a particular case. Our results exhibit both the exponential nature of French .rms. lifetimes as well as strong convex and fast decreasing time varying failure rates. Such a feature has some non- negligible impact insofar as it characterizes corresponding credit spreads’ Term structure.
    Keywords: credit risk, default probability, failure rate, fault tree, reliability, survival probability
    JEL: C1 D8
    Date: 2005–09–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wpa:wuwpem:0509002&r=rmg

This nep-rmg issue is ©2005 by Stan Miles. It is provided as is without any express or implied warranty. It may be freely redistributed in whole or in part for any purpose. If distributed in part, please include this notice.
General information on the NEP project can be found at http://nep.repec.org. For comments please write to the director of NEP, Marco Novarese at <director@nep.repec.org>. Put “NEP” in the subject, otherwise your mail may be rejected.
NEP’s infrastructure is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Massey University in New Zealand.