The ground-breaking Black-Scholes-Merton model has brought about a generation of derivative pricing models that have been successfully applied in the financial industry. It has been a long standing puzzle that the structural models of credit risk, as an application of the same modeling paradigm,...

By reinterpreting the calibration of structural models, a reassessment of the importance of the input variables is undertaken. The analysis shows that volatility is the key parameter to any calibration exercise, by several orders of magnitude. To maximize the sensitivity to volatility, a simple...

The rapid growth of the credit default swap (CDS) market and the increased number of defaults in recent years have led to major changes in the way CDS contracts are settled when default occurs. Auctions are increasingly the mechanism used to settle these contracts, replacing physical transfers...

We undertake a systematic study of the univariate and multivariate properties of CDS spreads using the CDS spread time series of CDX Investment Grade index constituents from 2005 to 2009. We find that CDS spread returns appear to be stationary and exhibit positive autocorrelations,...

We review different theoretical and empirical approaches for measuring the impact of liquidity on CDS prices. We start by reduced form models incorporating liquidity as an additional discount rate. We review Chen, Fabozzi and Sverdlove (2008) and Buhler and Trapp (2006, 2008), adopting different...

The aim of this paper is to extract credit-risk sensitive information from the quotes of equity options and CDSs. In particular, we wish to estimate the firm's leverage, as it is perceived by traders. This goal is achieved within a model à la Leland (1994), where stockholders have a perpetual...

Virtually all credit default swaps (CDS) are collateralized with a daily cash settlement of the variation margin equal to the change in their mark-to-market values. We show how the interest on the variation margin (also called price alignment interest) affects the value of CDS. Specifically, we...

In this study, we investigate the dynamics behind informed investors' trading decisions among Eu-ropean stock, options and credit default swap markets. This allows us to identify the predictive ex-planatory power of the unique information contained in each market with respect to future stock,...

In this note we show how to replicate a stylized CDS with a repurchase agreement and an asset swap. The latter must be designed in such a way that, on default of the issuer, it is terminated with a zero close-out amount. This break clause can be priced using the well known unilateral...

This paper studies game-type credit default swaps that allow the protection buyer and seller to raise or reduce their respective positions once prior to default. This leads to the study of an optimal stopping game subject to early default termination. Under a structural credit risk model based...