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This work evaluates some changes proposed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in regulating capital allocation in the trading book for equities following a company default. In the last decade, the committee designed some measures to account for the risk of a company default that the ten-day value-at-risk measure does not capture. The first and more conservative measure designed to capture the effect of defaults was the incremental risk charge. With time, this measure evolved into the default risk charge. We use a Merton model to compute the probability of default and compare this probability to simulated asset returns in order to compute the one-year value-at-risk and capture the risk of a company default. The analysis compares portfolios of Ibovespa companies and S&P 500 companies. Additionally, we propose a method to account for the correlation in the companies and compare the effects of the standard method of capital allocation to those of our models.

Quantitative finance combines mathematical finance, financial statistics, financial econometrics and empirical finance to provide a solid quantitative foundation for the analysis of financial issues. The purpose of this special issue on "Recent developments in quantitative finance" is to highlight some areas of research in which novel methods in quantitative finance have contributed significantly to the analysis of financial issues, specifically fast methods for large-scale non-elliptical portfolio optimization, the impact of acquisitions on new technology stocks: the Google–Motorola case, the effects of firm characteristics and recognition policy on employee stock options prices after controlling for self-selection, searching for landmines in equity markets, whether CEO incentive pay improves bank performance, using a quantile regression analysis of U.S. commercial banks, testing price pressure, information, feedback trading, and smoothing effects for energy exchange traded funds, actuarial implications of structural changes in El Niño-Southern Oscillation Index dynamics, credit spreads and bankruptcy information from options data, QMLE of a standard exponential ACD model: asymptotic distribution and residual correlation, and using two-part quantile regression to analyze how earnings shocks affect stock repurchases.

Renewable energy costs are now below those of fossil fuels. Five years ago, fossil fuels were the cheapest baseload. The collapse in renewable costs means that for 85% of the world, renewable electricity is the cheapest source of new baseload. By the early 2020s it will be every major country. Because of the rise of cheap renewables, the fossil fuel system is ripe for disruption. This disruption will be having profound financial implications for investors as a quarter of equity markets and half of corporate bond markets are “carbon entangled”…

The literature on indices herding behavior among bonds, equities, and real estate is very scant. When one compares developed and emerging markets, specifically the United States, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, and South Africa, such studies are hard to find. This study uses principal component analysis to extract and illustrate parameters driving herding investment behavior for the indices of the mentioned countries. Thereafter, the vector autoregressive model is used for robustness tests. The results reveal the following: First, governmental relationships and similarities among countries influenced herding behavior in the selected capital markets indices. Second, most of the herding occurs in the bond indices for the four countries. Finally, the robustness results reveal spillover opportunities in between and across countries irrespective of the index analyzed. The results are generalizable as they are consistent with prior studies such as Zaremba et al. (2021).