On Modeling Economic Default Time: A Reduced-Form Model Approach

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, much attention has been paid to investigating the appropriateness of the current practice of default risk modeling in banking, finance and insurance industries. A recent empirical study by Guo et al.(2008) shows that the time difference between the economic and recorded default dates has a significant impact on recovery rate estimates. Guo et al.(2011) develop a theoretical structural firm asset value model for a firm default process that embeds the distinction of these two default times. To be more consistent with the practice, in this paper, we assume the market participants cannot observe the firm asset value directly and developed a reduced-form model to characterize the economic and recorded default times. We derive the probability distribution of these two default times. The numerical study on the difference between these two shows that our proposed model can both capture the features and fit the empirical data.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1012.0843 by other author

On Reduced Form Intensity-based Model with Trigger Events

Corporate defaults may be triggered by some major market news or events such as financial crises or collapses of major banks or financial institutions. With a view to develop a more realistic model for credit risk analysis, we introduce a new type of reduced-form intensity-based model that can incorporate the impacts of both observable "trigger" events and economic environment on corporate defaults. The key idea of the model is to augment a Cox process with trigger events. Both single-default and multiple-default cases are considered in this paper. In the former case, a simple expression for the distribution of the default time is obtained. Applications of the proposed model to price defaultable bonds and multi-name Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) are provided

On Pricing Basket Credit Default Swaps

In this paper we propose a simple and efficient method to compute the ordered default time distributions in both the homogeneous case and the two-group heterogeneous case under the interacting intensity default contagion model. We give the analytical expressions for the ordered default time distributions with recursive formulas for the coefficients, which makes the calculation fast and efficient in finding rates of basket CDSs. In the homogeneous case, we explore the ordered default time in limiting case and further include the exponential decay and the multistate stochastic intensity process. The numerical study indicates that, in the valuation of the swap rates and their sensitivities with respect to underlying parameters, our proposed model outperforms the Monte Carlo method