IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/hal-00599995.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On the Term Structure of Default Premia in the Swap and LIBOR Markets

Author

Listed:
  • Bruno Solnik

    (GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Pierre Collin-Dufresne

Abstract

Existing theories of the term structure of swap rates provide an analysis of the Treasury-swap spread based on either a liquidity convenience yield in the Treasury market, or default risk in the swap market. While these models do not focus on the relation between corporate yields and swap rates (the LIBOR-Swap spread), they imply that the term structure of corporate yields and swap rates should be identical. As documented previously (e.g. in Sun, Sundares and Wang (1993)) this is counter-factual. Here, we propose a simple model of the (complex) default risk imbedded in the swap term structure that is able to explain the LIBOR-swap spread. Whereas corporate bonds carry default risk, we argue that swaps should bear less default risk. In fact, we assume that swap contracts are free of default risk. Because swaps are indexed on "refreshed"-credit-quality LIBOR rates, the spread between corporate yields and swap rates should capture the market's expectations of the probability of deterioration in credit quality of a corporate bond issuer. We model this feature and use our model to estimate the likelihood of future deterioration in credit quality from the LIBOR-swap spread. The analysis is important because it shows that the term structure of swap rates does not reflect the borrowing cost of a standard LIBOR credit quality issuer. It also has implications for modeling the dynamics of the swap term structure.

Suggested Citation

  • Bruno Solnik & Pierre Collin-Dufresne, 1998. "On the Term Structure of Default Premia in the Swap and LIBOR Markets," Working Papers hal-00599995, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-00599995
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-00599995. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.