A forward intensity model for the prediction of corporate defaults over different future periods is proposed. Maximum pseudo-likelihood analysis is then conducted on a large sample of the US industrial and financial firms spanning the period 1991–2011 on a monthly basis. Several commonly used...

From the onset of the 2008–2009 financial crisis to the subsequent European sovereign debt crisis, credit rating agencies have been assigned considerable blame. Reforming the credit rating industry has hence become an important policy issue. In addition to the regulatory efforts in the context...

It is well known that as the time interval between two consecutive observations shrinks to zero, a properly constructed GARCH model will weakly converge to a bivariate diffusion. Naturally the European option price under the GARCH model will also converge to its bivariate diffusion counterpart....

The transformed-data maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method for structural credit risk models developed by Duan [Duan, J.-C., 1994. Maximum likelihood estimation using price data of the derivative contract. Mathematical Finance 4, 155-167] is extended to account for the fact that observed...