Throughout history, the pace of knowledge and information sharing has evolved into an unthinkable speed and media. At the end of the XVII century, in Europe, the ideas that would shape the "Age of Enlightenment" were slowly being developed in coffeehouses, ...
This paper analyzes efficiency and profitability in the Swiss banking sector over the period 1997–2019. We find strong evidence for scale economies: for most banks in the sample, efficiency and profitability increase with bank size. Using an instrumental v ...
This thesis consists of three applications of machine learning techniques to risk management. The first chapter proposes a deep learning approach to estimate physical forward default intensities of companies. Default probabilities are computed using artifi ...
In this dissertation, I develop theory and evidence to argue that new technologies are central to how firms organize to create and capture value. I use computational methods such as reinforcement learning and probabilistic topic modeling to investigate thr ...
After the financial crisis, policy rates in the major advanced economies have moved downwards to near/below zero. Some countries have experienced an increase in house prices and an expansion of mortgages. Also, there have been considerable changes in the m ...
Low-for-long nominal interest rates have resulted in strong growth in mort- gage lending and real house prices in Switzerland. Domestically-oriented, small banks have mostly contributed to this expansion in mortgage lending while the two big, global system ...
The international greenhouse gas agreements call for mitigations in the building industry. Thus, the number of scientific publications about life-cycle performance assessment (LCPA) follows an exponential trend since the 2000s. However, previous surveys hi ...
This thesis develops models for three problems of liquidity under asymmetric information.
In the chapter "Disclosures, Rollover Risk, and Debt Runs" I build a model of dynamic debt
runs without perfect information in order to understand the impact of asset ...
Due to its enormous size and capital base, the insurance industry has the potential to play a key role in countering climate change. To this end, the major capital flows associated with its investment and underwriting businesses would need to be redirected ...
This thesis develops three models that study the motivation of various agents to take on debt,
and the impact that excessive financial leverage can have on social welfare.
In the chapter "Short-term Bank Leverage and the Value of Liquid Reserves", the ince ...
We introduce a novel class of credit risk models in which the drift of the survival process of a firm is a linear function of the factors. The prices of defaultable bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) are linear-rational in the factors. The price of a CDS ...
IRGC’s guidelines for the governance of systemic risks addresses the question of how to deal with systemic risks in the context of system transitions, i.e., in situations that require adaptation to new context conditions or transformation of an organisatio ...
The financial crisis of 2007-2009 drew attention to the essential role of banks for the macroeconomy and to the importance of having a resilient financial sector. A vulnerability in the financial sector spills over to the real economy and can drive it into ...
This thesis empirically explored the impacts of IT investment on three different scenarios under the common denominator / threads of IT investments. It comprises three different essays on the impacts of IT investments. IT investments and its impact on many ...
In this thesis I study how firms choose their optimal debt maturity. The recent financial crisis illustrated why debt maturity is an important determinant of firmsâ capital structure and it also renewed economistsâ interest in this topic, see for examp ...
Small-scale farmers are highly threatened by climate change. Experts often base their interventions to support farmers to adapt to climate change on their own perception of farmers' livelihood risks. However, if differences in risk perception between farme ...
This thesis examines the optimal mode of financing for banks and financial institutions. The first chapter, which is a joint work with Prof. Jean-Charles Rochet, investigates how Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs) should be financed. The ...
This thesis presents new flexible dynamic stochastic models for the evolution of market prices and new methods for the valuation of derivatives. These models and methods build on the recently characterized class of polynomial jump-diffusion processes for w ...
This paper models the housing sector, mortgages and endogenous default in a DSGE setting with nominal and real rigidities. We use data for the period 1981-2006 to estimate our model using Bayesian techniques. We analyze how an increase in risk in the mortg ...
This thesis analyzes the interrelation between market structure and price formation in credit derivatives markets. Traditionally, credit derivatives are traded in relatively opaque over-the-counter markets in which trading is segmented and subject to many ...
