Comparison Results for Exchangeable Credit Risk Portfolios

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to the risk analysis of credit portfolios. Assuming that default indicators form an exchangeable sequence of Bernoulli random variables and as a consequence of de Finetti's theorem, default indicators are Binomial mixtures. We can characterize the supermodular order between two exchangeable Bernoulli random vectors in terms of the convex ordering of their corresponding mixture distributions. Thus we can proceed to some comparisons between stoploss premiums, CDO tranche premiums and convex risk measures on aggregate losses. This methodology provides a unified analysis of dependence for a number of CDO pricing models based on factor copulas, multivariate Poisson and structural approaches.