We analyze portfolio credit risk in light of dynamic “frailty,” by which the credit qualities of different firms depend on common unobservable time-varying default covariates. Frailty is estimated to have a large impact on estimated conditional mean default rates, above and beyond those...

We provide maximum likelihood estimators of term structures of conditional probabilities of corporate default, incorporating the dynamics of firm-specific and macroeconomic covariates. For U.S. Industrial firms, based on over 390,000 firm-months of data spanning 1979 to 2004, the level and shape...

We provide maximum likelihood estimators of term structures of conditional probabilities of corporate default, incorporating the dynamics of firm-specific and m acroeconomic covariates. For U.S. Industrial firms, based on over 390,000 firm-months of data spanning 1979 to 2004, the level and...