IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rfinst/v12y1999i1p197-226.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Estimating the Price of Default Risk

Author

Listed:
  • Duffee, Gregory R

Abstract

A firm's instantaneous probability of default is modeled as a translated square-root diffusion process modified to allow the process to be correlated with default-free interest rates. The parameters of the process are estimated for 161 firms. An extended Kalman filter approach is used that incorporates both the time-series and cross-sectional (term structure) properties of the individual firms' bond prices. The model is reasonably successful at fitting corporate bond yields, while key features of the term structures of yield spreads are captured in the signs and magnitudes of the resulting parameter estimates. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

Suggested Citation

  • Duffee, Gregory R, 1999. "Estimating the Price of Default Risk," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 12(1), pages 197-226.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:12:y:1999:i:1:p:197-226
    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.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jones, E Philip & Mason, Scott P & Rosenfeld, Eric, 1984. "Contingent Claims Analysis of Corporate Capital Structures: An Empirical Investigation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 39(3), pages 611-625, July.
    2. Ball, Clifford A. & Torous, Walter N., 1996. "Unit roots and the estimation of interest rate dynamics," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 215-238, June.
    3. Dilip Madan & Haluk Unal, 1996. "Pricing the Risks of Default," Center for Financial Institutions Working Papers 94-16, Wharton School Center for Financial Institutions, University of Pennsylvania.
    4. Schwert, G William, 2002. "Tests for Unit Roots: A Monte Carlo Investigation," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 5-17, January.
    5. John C. Cox & Jonathan E. Ingersoll Jr. & Stephen A. Ross, 2005. "A Theory Of The Term Structure Of Interest Rates," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Sudipto Bhattacharya & George M Constantinides (ed.), Theory Of Valuation, chapter 5, pages 129-164, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    6. Duan, Jin-Chuan & Simonato, Jean-Guy, 1999. "Estimating and Testing Exponential-Affine Term Structure Models by Kalman Filter," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 13(2), pages 111-135, September.
    7. Gregory R. Duffee, "undated". "Treasury Yields and Corporate Bond Yield Spreads: An Empirical Analysis," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 1996-20, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), revised 10 Dec 2019.
    8. Mark Grinblatt, 2001. "An Analytic Solution for Interest Rate Swap Spreads," International Review of Finance, International Review of Finance Ltd., vol. 2(3), pages 113-149, September.
    9. Fisher, Lawrence, 1984. "Contingent Claims Analysis of Corporate Capital Structures: An Empirical Investigation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 39(3), pages 625-627, July.
    10. Robert A. Jarrow & Stuart M. Turnbull, 2008. "Pricing Derivatives on Financial Securities Subject to Credit Risk," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Financial Derivatives Pricing Selected Works of Robert Jarrow, chapter 17, pages 377-409, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    11. Sarig, Oded & Warga, Arthur, 1989. " Some Empirical Estimates of the Risk Structure of Interest Rates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 44(5), pages 1351-1360, December.
    12. Duffie, Darrell & Huang, Ming, 1996. "Swap Rates and Credit Quality," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(3), pages 921-949, July.
    13. Robert A. Jarrow & David Lando & Stuart M. Turnbull, 2008. "A Markov Model for the Term Structure of Credit Risk Spreads," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Financial Derivatives Pricing Selected Works of Robert Jarrow, chapter 18, pages 411-453, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    14. Merton, Robert C, 1974. "On the Pricing of Corporate Debt: The Risk Structure of Interest Rates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 29(2), pages 449-470, May.
    15. Kwan, Simon H., 1996. "Firm-specific information and the correlation between individual stocks and bonds," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 63-80, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lekkos, Ilias, 2007. "Modelling multiple term structures of defaultable bonds with common and idiosyncratic state variables," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 14(5), pages 783-817, December.
    2. repec:wyi:journl:002109 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Maclachlan, Iain C, 2007. "An empirical study of corporate bond pricing with unobserved capital structure dynamics," MPRA Paper 28416, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Viral V. Acharya & Jennifer N. Carpenter, 2002. "Corporate Bond Valuation and Hedging with Stochastic Interest Rates and Endogenous Bankruptcy," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 15(5), pages 1355-1383.
    5. Gurdip Bakshi & Dilip B. Madan & Frank X. Zhang, 2001. "Investigating the sources of default risk: lessons from empirically evaluating credit risk models," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2001-15, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    6. Samuel Chege Maina, 2011. "Credit Risk Modelling in Markovian HJM Term Structure Class of Models with Stochastic Volatility," PhD Thesis, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, number 1-2011.
    7. Marti G. Subrahmanyam & Young Ho Eom & Jun Uno, 2000. "Credit Risk and the Pricing of Japanese Yen Interest Rate Swaps," New York University, Leonard N. Stern School Finance Department Working Paper Seires 98-069, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business-.
    8. Brock Johnson & Jonathan Batten, 2003. "Forecasting Credit Spread Volatility: Evidence from the Japanese Eurobond Market," Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, Springer;Japanese Association of Financial Economics and Engineering, vol. 10(4), pages 335-357, December.
    9. Reneby, Joel & Ericsson, Jan, 2001. "The Valuation of Corporate Liabilities: Theory and Tests," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 445, Stockholm School of Economics, revised 07 Jan 2003.
    10. Saa-Requejo, Jesus & Santa-Clara, Pedro, 1997. "Bond Pricing with Default Risk," University of California at Los Angeles, Anderson Graduate School of Management qt3w71g2ch, Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA.
    11. Hongming Huang & Yildiray Yildirim, 2008. "Leverage, options liabilities, and corporate bond pricing," Review of Derivatives Research, Springer, vol. 11(3), pages 245-276, October.
    12. Kris Jacobs & Xiaofei Li, 2008. "Modeling the Dynamics of Credit Spreads with Stochastic Volatility," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 54(6), pages 1176-1188, June.
    13. Moraux, Franck, 2004. "Modeling the business risk of financially weakened firms: A new approach for corporate bond pricing," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 47-61.
    14. Qiang Dai & Kenneth Singleton, 2003. "Term Structure Dynamics in Theory and Reality," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 16(3), pages 631-678, July.
    15. Samuel Chege Maina, 2011. "Credit Risk Modelling in Markovian HJM Term Structure Class of Models with Stochastic Volatility," PhD Thesis, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, number 5, July-Dece.
    16. Jeremy Leake, 2003. "Credit spreads on sterling corporate bonds and the term structure of UK interest rates," Bank of England working papers 202, Bank of England.
    17. Augusto Castillo, 2004. "Firm and Corporate Bond Valuation: A Simulation Dynamic Programming Approach," Latin American Journal of Economics-formerly Cuadernos de Economía, Instituto de Economía. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile., vol. 41(124), pages 345-360.
    18. Lim, Terence & Lo, Andrew W. & Merton, Robert C. & Scholes, Myron S., 2006. "The Derivatives Sourcebook," Foundations and Trends(R) in Finance, now publishers, vol. 1(5–6), pages 365-572, April.
    19. Lara Cathcart & Lina El-Jahel, 2006. "Pricing defaultable bonds: a middle-way approach between structural and reduced-form models," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(3), pages 243-253.
    20. Hayne E. Leland., 1998. "Agency Costs, Risk Management, and Capital Structure," Research Program in Finance Working Papers RPF-278, University of California at Berkeley.
    21. Mr. Iryna V. Ivaschenko, 2003. "How Much Leverage is too Much, or Does Corporate Risk Determine the Severity of a Recession?," IMF Working Papers 2003/003, International Monetary Fund.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:oup:rfinst:v:12:y:1999:i:1:p:197-226. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfsssea.html .

    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.