In the present paper we fill an essential gap in the Convertible Bonds pricing world by deriving a Binary Tree based model for valuation subject to credit risk. This model belongs to the framework known as Equity to Credit Risk. We show that this model converges in continuous time to the model...

The authors price corporate debt from a structural model of firm default. They assume that the capital market brings about efficient firm default when the continuation value of the firm falls below the value it would have after bankruptcy restructuring. This characterization of default makes the...

While empirical literature has documented a negative relation between default risk and stock returns, the theory suggests that default risk should be positively priced. We provide an explanation for this "default anomaly", by calculating monthly probabilities of default (PDs) for a large sample...

In contrast to Robert Mundell‘s Optimum Currency Area theory and his recommendation of forming monetary union, the economic fundamentals of Euro area member countries have not harmonized. The opposite holds: the Euro core countries – most of all Germany, but also the Netherlands and Finland...

Forecasting the stock returns in the emerging markets is challenging due to their peculiar characteristics. These markets exhibit linear as well as nonlinear features and Conventional forecasting methods partially succeed in dealing with the nonlinear nature of stock returns. Contrarily,...

Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John and Natty McArthur University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new...

Spreads of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) vary significantly in the cross section and over time, but the sources of this variation are not well understood. We document that, in the cross section, MBS spreads adjusted for the prepayment option show a pronounced smile with respect to the...

Prior research uses the basic one-period European call-option pricing model to compute default measures for individual firms and concludes that both the size and book-to-market effects are related to default risk. For example, small firms earn higher return than big firms only if they have...