This paper aims at showing how the state may be an example in evaluation firms' quality. We develop this idea referring to a concrete experimental tool developed by the French Small Business Administration.

Reliability has been largely applied to industrial systems in order to study the various possibilities of systems’ failure. The goal is to establish the chain of events leading to any system’s failure, namely the top event. Looking for the minimal paths leading to any system’s fault allows...

In this paper we compare market prices of credit default swaps with model prices. We show that a simple reduced form model with a constant recovery rate outperforms the market practice of directly comparing bonds' credit spreads to default swap premiums. We find that the model works well for...

A family of credit risk models is proposed to capture three salient features of Latin American (LA) Sovereign Bond Markets: individual Long Range Dependence in volatility---Long Memory (LM)---, high fractional comovement and time varying risk premia. Evidence in favor of LM is uncovered and the...

Recently there has been some interest in the credit risk literature in models which involve stopping times related to excursions. The classical Black-Scholes-Merton-Cox approach postulates that default may occur, either at or before maturity, when the firm's value process falls below a critical...

In this paper, we develop a generalized affine model to characterize correlated credit risk of multi-firms. When valuing credit derivatives, this new approach allows to incorporate correlative market and credit risk, interdependent default risk structure and counterparty risk into consideration....

Can scoring models help microfinance lenders in poor countries as much as they have helped credit-card lenders in rich countries? I model the probability that loans from a microlender in Bolivia had arrears of 15 days or more. Although arrears in microfinance depend on many factors difficult to...

This paper presents a scoring model that predicts the risk of drop-out for borrowers at a microfinance lender in Bolivia. Drop-out risk was greater for women, manufacturers, newer borrowers, and those with more arrears. Out-of-sample tests suggest that scoring may help microfinance lenders to...

In this paper we have combined fundamental analysis and contingent claim analysis into a hybrid model of credit risk measurement. We have extended the standard Merton approach to estimate a new risk neutral distance to default metric, assuming a more complex capital structure, adjusting for...

We extend the credit risk valuation framework introduced by Gatfaoui (2003) to stochastic volatility models. We state a general setting for valuing risky debt in the light of systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk, which are known to affect each risky asset in the financial market. The option...