Fixed Income Securities and Credit Markets

Prerequisites are the same as for any standard course in security evaluation.

This course provides a grounding in recent developments in fixed income security pricing, hedging and portfolio management that insists on both conceptual evaluation methods and the many details arising in market practice. By the end of the course, the students will be familiar with a variety of topics, including (i) the institutions, organization and conduct of the fixed income markets; (ii) the basic techniques to analyze and hedge fixed income products, such as “curve fitting,” “bootstrapping,” duration, convexity, duration-based hedging and asset-liability management; (iii) the analysis of the “destabilizing” effects related to the use of certain fixed income derivative products; (iv) the economic forces, or “factors,” driving the variation in the entire spectrum of interest rates at different maturities; (v) relations between the yield curve and macroeconomic developments; (vi) the main evaluation tools (trees, no arbitrage trees, calibration and continuous time models), applied to a consistent pricing of a wide range of products, including government bonds, corporate bonds (convertible, callable, puttable), plain vanilla interest rate derivatives (interest rate swaps, caps, floors, swaptions, etc.); (vii) the main conceptual approaches to analyze credit markets; (viii) the process of securitization and the resulting structured products, with particular reference to collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-based securities; (ix) an overview of the main evaluation models of sovereign default.

Readings

Selected parts of:
Mele, Antonio (2022): Financial Economics. MIT Press.

The course provides an introduction into the functioning of fixed income and credit markets and the interactions of these markets with the macroeconomy and financial stability. Students will learn both conceptual approaches and the main principles that guide market practice.

In presenza

Regular lectures and classes as well as invited lectures from guest speakers including industry leaders and high representatives of regulatory and policy bodies.

Two hour written examination.