Fat tails of q-Gaussian distributions of daily log-leverage-returns of 520 North American industrial firms reported by Katz and Tian (2013) imply a significantly higher credit risk at short time-horizons and/or large initial distances to the default barrier than forecasted by traditional...

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...