Credit Default Swaps can be used to lower capital requirements of dealer banks who enter into uncollateralized derivatives positions with sovereigns. We show in a model that the regulatory incentive to obtain capital relief makes CDS contracts valuable to dealer banks and empirically that,...

The term structure of interest rates contains information about the market's expectations of the direction of future interest rates. Similarly, the term structure of credit spreads contains information about the market's perception of future credit spreads. The term structure of credit spreads...

We revisit a test for conditional independence in intensity models of default proposed by Das, Duffie, Kapadia, Saita (2007) (DDKS). Based on a sample of US corporate defaults, they reject the conditional independence assumption but also observe that the test is a joint test of the specification...

Distance-to-default is a remarkably robust measure for ranking firms according to their risk of default. The ranking seems to work despite the fact that the Merton model from which the measure is derived produces default probabilities that are far too small when applied to real data. We use...

This paper analyzes the pricing of defaultable securities in rating-based models where the default of more than one agent is involved. We extend the model of Duffie and Huang (1996) to a framework which explicitly takes into account the rating of each party. Our extension allows us to...

We revisit a method used by Das, Duffie, Kapadia, and Saita (2007) (DDKS) to test the doubly stochastic assumption in intensity models of default. We show that using a different specification of the default intensity, and using the same test as DDKS, we cannot reject using an almost identical...

This paper provides a Markov Model for the term structure of credit risk spreads. The model is based on Jarrow and Turnbull (1995) with the bankruptcy process following a discrete state space Markov chain in credit ratings. The parameters of this process are easily estimated using observable...

This paper provides a Markov model for the term structure of credit risk spreads. The model is based on Jarrow and Turnbull (1995) with the bankruptcy process following a discrete state space Markov chain in credit ratings. The parameters of this process are easily estimated using observable...