Debt valuation and chapter 22

Numerous studies have examined the effect on credit spreads of renegotiation. These studies have generally focused on the impact on spread levels in general, and not on how renegotiation influences the relative pricing of senior versus junior debt claims. In this paper, we show that the scope for sequential renegotiation may reduce and even eliminate the premium for debt seniority. Our analysis also explains why companies may engage in repeated Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings (a phenomenon commonly referred to as Chapter 22)

Commentary on four papers on credit risk modeling

Bank capital ; Bank loans ; Risk ; Bank management

European pension systems: a simulation analysis

Pension systems in different countries vary widely in such aspects as the dependence of benefits on earlier labour income, the minimum permitted retirement age and limits on labour supply after retirement. This paper uses a simulation model of a rational, utility-maximising household facing the detailed pension provisions of eight European countries to study microeconomic distortions induced by the different rules and regulations. We examine in particular the impact on savings, labour supply, retirement age decisions and welfare.

Compressive Embedding and Visualization using Graphs

Visualizing high-dimensional data has been a focus in data analysis communities for decades, which has led to the design of many algorithms, some of which are now considered references (such as t-SNE for example). In our era of overwhelming data volumes, the scalability of such methods have become more and more important. In this work, we present a method which allows to apply any visualization or embedding algorithm on very large datasets by considering only a fraction of the data as input and then extending the information to all data points using a graph encoding its global similarity. We show that in most cases, using only $\mathcal{O}(\log(N))$ samples is sufficient to diffuse the information to all $N$ data points. In addition, we propose quantitative methods to measure the quality of embeddings and demonstrate the validity of our technique on both synthetic and real-world datasets

Tracking Time-Vertex Propagation using Dynamic Graph Wavelets

Graph Signal Processing generalizes classical signal processing to signal or data indexed by the vertices of a weighted graph. So far, the research efforts have been focused on static graph signals. However numerous applications involve graph signals evolving in time, such as spreading or propagation of waves on a network. The analysis of this type of data requires a new set of methods that fully takes into account the time and graph dimensions. We propose a novel class of wavelet frames named Dynamic Graph Wavelets, whose time-vertex evolution follows a dynamic process. We demonstrate that this set of functions can be combined with sparsity based approaches such as compressive sensing to reveal information on the dynamic processes occurring on a graph. Experiments on real seismological data show the efficiency of the technique, allowing to estimate the epicenter of earthquake events recorded by a seismic network

Low-Rank Matrices on Graphs: Generalized Recovery & Applications

Many real world datasets subsume a linear or non-linear low-rank structure in a very low-dimensional space. Unfortunately, one often has very little or no information about the geometry of the space, resulting in a highly under-determined recovery problem. Under certain circumstances, state-of-the-art algorithms provide an exact recovery for linear low-rank structures but at the expense of highly inscalable algorithms which use nuclear norm. However, the case of non-linear structures remains unresolved. We revisit the problem of low-rank recovery from a totally different perspective, involving graphs which encode pairwise similarity between the data samples and features. Surprisingly, our analysis confirms that it is possible to recover many approximate linear and non-linear low-rank structures with recovery guarantees with a set of highly scalable and efficient algorithms. We call such data matrices as \textit{Low-Rank matrices on graphs} and show that many real world datasets satisfy this assumption approximately due to underlying stationarity. Our detailed theoretical and experimental analysis unveils the power of the simple, yet very novel recovery framework \textit{Fast Robust PCA on Graphs

Inpainting of long audio segments with similarity graphs

We present a novel method for the compensation of long duration data loss in audio signals, in particular music. The concealment of such signal defects is based on a graph that encodes signal structure in terms of time-persistent spectral similarity. A suitable candidate segment for the substitution of the lost content is proposed by an intuitive optimization scheme and smoothly inserted into the gap, i.e. the lost or distorted signal region. Extensive listening tests show that the proposed algorithm provides highly promising results when applied to a variety of real-world music signals