During the recent crisis, lags in the transmission mechanism of economic shocks, together with monetary and fiscal policy, made it difficult to assess the evolving dynamics of creditworthiness. As such, developments in financial markets became a key guide for investors and policymakers in...

There is a close link between prices of equity options and the default probability of a firm. We show that in the presence of positive expected equity recovery, standard methods that assume zero equity recovery at default misestimate the option-implied default probability. We introduce a simple...

In this paper, we present a novel method to extract the risk-neutral probability of default of a firm from American put option prices. Building on the idea of a default corridor proposed in Carr and Wu (2011), we derive a parsimonious closed-form formula for American put option prices from which...

The paper explores the link between financial distress and the commodity price hedging behaviour of Canadian oil firms. Specifically, we argue that the expected costs of financial distress have been associated with the hedging behaviour for Canadian oil firms between 2005 and 2015. We use...