Abstract. The evaluation of structured credit products like baskets and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) most often relies on the simulation of correlated default times for the underlying pool of credit instruments. Given the distribution of a default time vector one can find the distribution of the corresponding (cumulative) default quote path for a portfolio. In this note we show that t...

In the absence of forward-looking models for recovery rates, market participants tend to use exogenously assumed constant recovery rates in pricing models. We develop a flexible jumpto-default model that uses observables: the stock price and stock volatility in conjunction with credit spreads to identify implied, endogenous, dynamic functions of the recovery rate and default probability. The mo...

In this document we show how to handle counterparty risk for Interest Rate Swaps (IRS). First we establish a general formula, showing that counterparty risk adds one level of optionality to the contract. Then we introduce the default probabilities using a deterministic intensity model where the default time is modeled as the first jump of a time-inhomogeneous Poisson process. We consider Credit...

The pricing of collateralized debt obligations and other basket credit derivatives is contingent upon (i) a realistic modeling of the firms’ default times and the correlation between them, and (ii) efficient computational methods for computing the portfolio loss distribution from the individual firms’ default time distributions. Factor models, a widelyused class of pricing models, are computati...