A forward intensity model for the prediction of corporate defaults over different future periods is proposed. Maximum pseudo-likelihood analysis is then conducted on a large sample of the US industrial and financial firms spanning the period 1991-2011 on a monthly basis. Several commonly used...

The transformed-data maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method for struc- tural credit risk models developed by Duan (1994) is extended to account for the fact that observed equity prices may have been contaminated by trading noises. With the presence of trading noises, the likelihood function...