Accurate credit-granting decisions are crucial to the efficiency of the decentralized capital allocation mechanisms in modern market economies. Credit bureaus and many financial institutions have developed and used credit-scoring models to standardize and automate, to the extent possible, credit...

Banks using either the Foundation or Advanced option of the Internal Ratings Based approach to credit risk under Basel II must estimate long-run annual average default probabilities for buckets of homogeneous assets. The one-factor model underlying the capital calculations in Basel II has...

Dependence among defaults both across assets and over time has proven to be an important characteristic of financial risk. A Bayesian approach to default rate estimation is proposed and illustrated using a prior distributions assessed from an experienced industry expert. Two extensions of the...