This work documents the existence of a cointegration relationship between credit spreads, leverage and equity volatility for a large set of US companies. It is shown that accounting for the long-run equilibrium dynamic between these variables is essential to correctly explain credit spread...

The aim of this work is to understand and measure to what extent equity options price credit risk. With the exception of Toft and Prucyk (1997), which is a dated work based on the simplistic assumption of a reference company issuing perpetual debt, all the work in the literature which try to...

Currency and interest rate swaps are subject to a complex, two-sided default risk. Although several theoretical papers have recently addressed the problem of pricing swap credit risk, the empirical literature is almost non-existent. This is the only study we know of that uses actual transaction...

We study whether firms spread out debt maturity dates, which we call "granularity of corporate debt.'' In our model, firms that are unable to roll over expiring debt need to liquidate assets. If multiple small asset sales are less inefficient than a single large one, it can be optimal to...

We generalize the asset dynamics assumptions of Leland (1994b) and Leland and Toft (1996) to a much richer class of models. By assuming a stationary corporate debt structure with constant principal, coupon payment and average maturity through continuous retirement and refinancing as long as the...

This paper introduces a measure that captures the premium in bond prices that is due to the value of creditor control. We estimate the premium as the difference in the bond price and an equivalent synthetic bond without control rights that is constructed using CDS contracts. Empirically, we find...

The dissertation examines the effect of counterparty risk on the price difference between defaulted US bond prices (market-based recovery) and the corresponding final CDS auction prices (auction-based recovery) during the CDS auction day for the period of 2008-2015. The counterparty risk is...

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...

Credit risk models have played a key part in the global credit crisis. The main shortcomings of these models are examined and a new causal framework is proposed to build deductive credit default models that have predictive capabilities

Assessing default risks for Chinese firms is hard. Standard measures of risk using market indicators may be unreliable because of implicit guarantees, the large role played by less-informed investors, and other market imperfections. We test this assertion by estimating stand-alone 1-year default...