Two models of default risk are prominent in the financial literature: Merton's structural model and Altman's reduced-form model. The former has the benefit of being responsive, since the probabilities of default can continually be updated with the evolution of firms' asset values. Its main flaw...

We use the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation approach to estimate the default barriers from market values of equities for a sample of 762 public industrial Canadian firms. The ML approach allows estimating simultaneously the asset's instantaneous drift, volatility and the barrier level, when...