An Empirical Implementation of CreditGrades

We use the CreditGrades credit risk model to value credit default swap (CDS) spreads for public companies at the intersection of the S&P 100 index and Moody's Bottom Rung report for the global financial crisis period from 2007Q3 to 2009Q2. We implement this canonical credit risk model in accordance with the *CreditGrades technical document* jointly developed by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, and RiskMetrics. Our empirical study focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of the chosen risk model by analyzing the main empirical results with several complementary statistical and qualitative tests for better triangulation