Lending institutions’ reluctance to lend to MSMEs or to offer them competitive interest rates stems from the relatively costly information acquisition for small loans. The central idea is to bridge the information gap between the demand and the supply side by creating a credit analytics...

The transformed-data maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method for struc- tural credit risk models developed by Duan (1994) is extended to account for the fact that observed equity prices may have been contaminated by trading noises. With the presence of trading noises, the likelihood function...

We propose a density-tempered marginalized sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler, a new class of samplers for full Bayesian inference of general state-space models. The dynamic states are approximately marginalized out using a particle filter, and the parameters are sampled via a sequential Monte...

A method for computing forward-looking market risk premium is developed in this paper. We first derive a theoretical expression that links forward-looking risk premium to investors' risk aversion and cumulative return's forward-looking volatility, skewness and kurtosis. In addition, investor's...

We estimate term structures of default probabilities for private firms using data consisting of 1,759 default events from 29,894 firms between 1999 and 2014. Each firm's default likelihood is characterized by a forward intensity model employing macro risk factors and firm-specific attributes. As...

This paper considers the pricing of options when there are jumps in the pricing kernel and correlated jumps in asset returns and volatilities. Our model nests Duan's GARCH option models, where conditional returns are constrained to being normal, as well as mixed jump processes as used in Merton....

A high-quality and granular probability of default (PD) model is on many practical dimensions far superior to any categorical credit rating system. Business adoption of a PD model, however, needs to factor in the long-established business/regulatory conventions built around letter-based credit...

An estimation method is developed for extracting the latent stochastic volatility from VIX, a volatility index for the Samp;P 500 index return produced by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) using the so-called model-free volatility construction. Our model specification encompasses all...