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...

A data-cloning SMC² method is proposed as a general purpose optimization routine for estimating latent variable models by maximum likelihood. The latent variables are first marginalized out by SMC at any fixed parameter value, and the model parameters are then estimated by density tempered SMC....