Structured products and the concept of structuring are central to finance and investments. The concept of structured claims is ancient, extending at least to early landowner–tenant agricultural relationships, in which landowner and tenants would have claims of different priority on receiving the benefits of the harvest.

Chapter 25 provides an introduction to structuring and to the structural modeling approach to credit risk. The chapter goes on to introduce an important sector of structured products that includes collateralized mortgage obligations and collateralized debt obligations. Chapter 26 discusses credit risk and credit derivatives, with an emphasis on credit default swaps. These important derivatives facilitate the management and transfer of credit risk, which facilitates, among other things, efficient diversification. The chapter also discusses the reduced-form modeling approach to credit risk. Chapter 27 provides a more detailed analysis of collateralized debt obligations. Finally, Chapter 28 provides an introduction to structured products that are linked to underlying equity products or that have other specially engineered risk exposures.