This paper tests empirically the performance of three structural models of corporate bond pricing, namely Merton (1974), Leland (1994) and Fan and Sundaresan (2000). While the first two models overestimate bond prices, the Fan and Sundaresan model reveals an extremely good performance. When...

Recently there has been some interest in the credit risk literature in models which involve stopping times related to excursions. The classical Black-Scholes-Merton-Cox approach postulates that default may occur, either at or before maturity, when the firm's value process falls below a critical...

We propose and examine a simple model for credit migration and spread curves of a single firm both under the real-world and the risk-neutral measure. This model is a hybrid of a structural and a reduced-form model. Default is triggered either by successive downgradings of the firm or an...

This paper studies the existence of single-price price equilibrium from a given initial distribution of money holdings in a search-theoretic model of money where agents have no time preference. The model is similar to the authors' recent models of search economies with no constraints on money...

This paper presents a model of an economy in which traders use social capital to reduce transaction costs. A key assumption is that there are two types of social capital: “village” capital relies on personal networks and repeat play to guarantee contracts; “market” capital relies on...