Diffusion in a linear potential in the presence of position-dependent killing is used to mimic a default process. Different assumptions regarding transport coefficients, initial conditions, and elasticity of the killing measure lead to diverse models of bankruptcy. One “stylized fact” is...

We study the probability distributions of daily leverage returns of 520 North American industrial companies that survive de-listing during the financial crisis, 2006-2012. We provide evidence that distributions of unbiased leverage returns of all individual firms belong to the class of...

The q-Gaussian generalization of the Merton framework allows pricing of the additional risk premium related to fluctuations of the variance of the market value of a company's assets, which can explain the observed level of short-term CDS spreads of investment grade issuers. The derived simple...

We present the non-Gaussian extension of the traditional Merton framework, which takes into account slowly relaxing fluctuations of the volatility of the firm's market value of financial assets. The minimal version of the model depends on the Tsallis entropic parameter q and the generalized...