Dynamics of Corporate Security Prices in Firm Value Models with Incomplete Information

The paper studies structural credit risk models with incomplete information of the asset value. It is shown that the pricing of typical corporate securities such as equity, corporate bonds or CDSs leads to a nonlinear filtering problem. This problem cannot be tackled with standard techniques as the default time does not have an intensity under full information. Using the Dellacherie-formula the problem is transformed to a standard filtering problem for a stopped diffusion process. This problem is analyzed via SPDE results from the filtering literature. In particular we are able to characterize the default intensity under incomplete information in terms of the conditional density of the asset value process. Moreover, we give an explicit description of the dynamics of corporate security prices. Finally, we briefly explain how the model can be applied to the pricing of bond and equity options.