We conduct a thorough analysis on the role played by the unobserved systematic risk factor in default prediction. We … find that this latent factor outweighs the observed systematic risk factors and can substantially improve the in … systematic risk factor when simulating portfolio credit losses. However, we also find that this factor only marginally improves …

We examine the impact of the unobservable systematic risk factor on default prediction model performance. We find that … including the unobservable systematic risk factor might help improve predictive accuracy, but it might not help improve rank … ordering of firms by default risk. Rank ordering is mainly driven by firm-level variables, while predictive accuracy is …

firms and concludes that both the size and book-to-market effects are related to default risk. For example, small firms earn … higher return than big firms only if they have higher default risk and value stocks earn higher returns than growth stocks if … their default risk is high. In this paper we use a more advanced compound option pricing model for the computation of …

While empirical literature has documented a negative relation between default risk and stock returns, the theory … suggests that default risk should be positively priced. We provide an explanation for this "default anomaly", by calculating … components. The systematic part, measured as the PD sensitivity to aggregate default risk, is positively related to stock returns …