Default risk: Poisson mixture and the business cycle

As emphasized by the introduction of Basel II, the macroeconomic factors strongly affect credit risk variables. In order to account for the business cycle in a forward-looking way, a macroeconomic forecast can be introduced in the estimation of credit risk variables. This work proposes to model the distribution of the default rate as a mixture distribution which accounts for a binary representation of the business cycle: the distribution changes according to the estimated probability of recession over the credit horizon considered.