Recent work has suggested that strategic underperformance of debt-service obligations by equity holders can resolve the gap between observed yield spreads and those generated by Merton (1974)-style models.(...)

In this paper, we investigate the pricing of Japanese yen interest rate swaps during the period 1990-96. We obtain measures of the spreads of the swap rates over comparable Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs) for different maturities and analyze the relationship between the swap spreads and credit...

We build a multi-factor, no-arbitrage model of the term structure of spot interest rates. The stochastic factors are the short-term interest rate and the premia of the futures rates over the short-term interest rates.(...)