The standard measures of distress risk ignore the fact that firm defaults are correlated and that some defaults are more likely to occur in bad times. We use risk premium computed from corporate credit spreads to measure a firm’s exposure to systematic variation in default risk. Unlike...

While Arzac and Glosten (2005) affirm that "the value of tax shields depends upon the nature of the equity stochastic process, which, in turn, depends upon the free cash flow process," I prove that the value of tax shields depends only upon the nature of the stochastic process of the net...

Modeling defaults is critical to risk management as well as pricing debt portfolios and portfolio derivatives. In the recent financial crisis, multi-billion-dollar losses resulted from correlated defaults that were improperly modeled. This paper proposes statistical approximations which are more...

This paper analyzes the capital structure of a firm in an infinite time horizon following Leland (1994) under the more general hypothesis that the firm’s assets value process belongs to a fairly large class of stochastic volatility models. By applying singular perturbation theory, we fully...

Since the end of the nineties, Basle Committee has required that banks compute periodically their VaR and maintain sufficient capital to pay the eventual losses projected by VaR. Unfortunately, there is not only one measure of VaR because volatility, which is a fundamental component of VaR, is...

This paper shows that forward default intensities in the Black and Cox (1976) model of corporate default can be expressed in terms of the Mills Ratio (Mills, 1926). The behaviour of the forward default intensity and hence the survivorship functions then follows from inequalities that are...

We document a higher bond return volatility around the time of default for bonds included in CDS auctions (especially cheapest-to-deliver bonds) versus those that are not, while controlling for firm fundamentals and bond illiquidity. This finding does not extend to time periods far ahead of...

We investigate the informational content of credit default swap (CDS) spreads for future volatility of (firm) assets and equity. In the cross-section, CDS spreads are significantly more informative about future asset than equity volatility. The informational content of historical and option...

We discuss a simple, exactly solvable model of stochastic stock dynamics that incorporates regime switching between healthy and distressed regimes. Using this model, which is analytically tractable, we discuss a way of extracting expected returns for stocks from realized CDS spreads,...

Using a continuous time, structural model of a dealer-bank, we derive fair value equations for credit risky financial products that can not be perfectly hedged, fully taking into account the impact the contracts have on the dealer-bank's earnings volatility and, consequently, their solvency and...