Title: Credit Risk Modeling and Analysis Using Copula Method and Changepoint Approach to Survival Data
Description: This thesis consists of two parts. The first part uses Gaussian Copula and Student's t Copula as the main tools to model the credit risk in securitizations and re-securitizations. The second part proposes a statistical procedure to identify changepoints in Cox model of survival data. The recent 2007-2009 financial crisis has been regarded as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression by leading economists. The securitization sector took a lot of blame for the crisis because of the connection of the securitized products created from mortgages to the collapse of the housing market. The first part of this thesis explores the relationship between securitized mortgage products and the 2007-2009 financial crisis using the Copula method as the main tool. We show in this part how loss distributions of securitizations and re-securitizations can be derived or calculated in a new model. Simulations are conducted to examine the effectiveness of the model. As an application, the model is also used to examine whether and where the ratings of securitized products could be flawed.

On the other hand, the lag effect and saturation effect problems are common and important problems in survival data analysis. They belong to a general class of problems where the treatment effect takes occasional jumps instead of staying constant throughout time. Therefore, they are essentially the changepoint problems in statistics. The second part of this thesis focuses on extending Lai and Xing's recent work in changepoint modeling, which was developed under a time series and Bayesian setup, to the lag effect problems in survival data. A general changepoint approach for Cox model is developed. Simulations and real data analyses are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the procedure and how it should be implemented and interpreted.