This paper presents a utility function refinement that explains the empirical irrelevance of risk to returns. The key is that in an environment where people care about relative wealth, risk is a deviation from what everyone else is doing, and therefore becomes like diversifiable risk in the...

In this paper we succinctly outline the modeling approach of Moody's for private firm default prediction. The processes of transforming ratios, weighting the transformations, and mapping to a default probability are examined. Accounting ratios in the US, Canada, and Australia are compared and...