Firm-level default models are important for bottom-up modeling of the default risk of corporate debt portfolios. However, models in the literature typically have several strict assumptions which may yield biased results, notably a linear effect of covariates on the log-hazard scale, no...

A number of papers document that recent machine learning models outperform traditional corporate distress models in terms of accurately ranking firms by their riskiness. However, it remains unanswered whether advanced machine learning models can capture correlations in distresses sufficiently...