This paper studies the default anomaly that has been documented in the literature. We show that after controlling for the default-risk premium the default anomaly disappears. In contrast, controlling for credit spreads does not fully eliminate the anomaly. We also relate our results to the IVOL...

This paper provides an alternative approach to the structural credit risk models. The first-passage-time approach extends the original Merton (Journal of Finance 29, 449-470) model by accounting for the fact that the default may occur not only at the debt's maturity, but also prior to this date....