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In this article the results of an extensive research on the credit risk of Icelandic municipalities are presented. The methodology named after Altman was applied and the credit risk of Icelandic municipalities was assessed according to his model. In addition the relationship between financial health and the size of municipalities was examined. Finally a small study was conducted where the financial health of municipalities around the capital area was different from other. The results are that this methodology is useful when evaluating the credit risk of Icelandic municipalities. The findings indicate that Icelandic municipalities have been able to continue functioning financially even though being very weak financially. Smaller municipalities were on average much financially stronger than the larger ones. But there was not a statistical significant difference in the financial strength of municipalities around the capital to other municipalities around the country.

AbstractLegislatures differ in their institutional capacity to draft and enact policy. While strong legislatures can increase the congruence of policy outcomes to the electorate's preferences, they can also inject uncertainty into markets with their ability to alter the political economic landscape. We argue that this uncertainty will manifest in a state's ability to borrow and hypothesize a negative relationship between legislative capacity and creditworthiness. Using ratings of general obligation bonds issued by the American states over nearly two decades and data on the institutional capacity of state legislative assemblies, we find support for the claim that having a legislature that is better equipped to affect policy change increases credit risk evaluations. The results we present broaden our understanding of the importance of legislative institutions, the determinants of credit risk, and the economic implications of democratic responsiveness.

The thesis starts with a short description of the credit derivatives' place in the credit risk management. Then it proceeds by outlining the basic forms of credit derivatives, their applications, and their contract elements. A short description of the two common pricing frameworks for credit derivatives, the Firm's Value Models and the Credit Rating Transition Models is given. The major approach reviewed in this thesis is the one of Duffie-Singleton for valuing credit derivatives with term structure models. This framework is also applied in a simulation and examines the importance of the different parameters on the outcome. Also examples for the valuation of Default Digital Swaps and Puts as well as Credit Default Swaps and Puts are given.

This article attempts to identify the default risk measure which best reflects the idiosyncratic context of public family firms. Seven accounting- and market-based measures are compared over a sample of 981 US family and non-family firms for the period 2000–2016. The results show that the Black–Scholes–Merton (BSM) measure gives the best fit in both types of firm. However, all the accounting-based measures, especially Altman's Z-score, come closest to the market-based measures when used to assess the credit risk of family firms. The two types of measures also coincide more closely in their default risk orderings of family than of non-family firms. Useful practical implications can be drawn from these findings, which show that accounting-based measures can be used reliably in the absence of market data for family firms with similar characteristics to those in our sample.JEL CLASSIFICATION: G32; G33; G13; C52; M21; M41