An important research area of the corporate yield spread literature seeks to measure the proportion of the spread that can be explained by factors such as the possibility of default, liquidity, tax differentials and market risk. We contribute to this literature by assessing the ability of...

We revisit the specification of GARCH processes with Johnson Su innovations examined in Choi and Nam (2008). This model, allowing for skewed and leptokurtic innovations, has many advantages over well known alternatives. We examine a simpler version of their specification which does not require...

The empirical analysis of new warrant issues in the context of a structural model of the firm typically assumes the absence of debt and a perfect equity pricing model. We examine here an approach relaxing these two assumptions. The proposed approach develops simple analytical expressions for the...

An approach to approximate the multivariate distribution of time-aggregated stock returns in the GARCH context is developed here. The approach yields a one time-step simulation procedure as opposed to a multiple time-step simulation required in such a context. For this purpose, the exact moment...

The method here to price discretely monitored barrier options in both constant and time-varying volatility valuation frameworks uses a time-homogeneous Markov chain to approximate the underlying asset price process. It provides a natural framework for this pricing process because the discrete...

An important research area of the corporate yield spread literature seeks to measure the proportion of the spread explained by various factors such as the possibility of default, liquidity or tax differentials. We contribute to this literature by assessing the ability of observed macroeconomic...

One critical difficulty in implementing Merton's (1974) credit risk model is that the underlying asset value cannot be directly observed. The model requires the unobserved asset value and the unknown volatility parameter as inputs. The estimation problem is further complicated by the fact that...