Essays on Sovereign and Banking Credit Risk

In view of growing concerns about financial stability, this thesis revolves over two major objectives. The first objective relates to exploiting option pricing models to generate bank and sovereign credit risk indicators and is pursued in chapters One and Two. The second objective is about determining the extent to which key institutions, namely the credit rating agencies and the ECB contributed to curing or hampering the European banking system. Chapter Three and Chapter Four address the latter theme. All through this thesis, we lay stress upon the connection between banks and sovereigns.