We propose a new mortgage contract that endogenizes the risk of house price declines and thus minimizes default risk resulting from changes in the underlying asset value while still retaining contract rates near the cost of a standard fixed-rate mortgage. Our new mortgage recognizes that the lender is the most economically efficient bearer of house price risk. By reducing the role of the legal ...

This paper analyzes the association between aggregate default and recovery rates on credit assets, and seeks to empirically explain this critical relationship. We examine recovery rates on corporate bond defaults, over the period 1982-2002. Our econometric univariate and multivariate models explain a significant portion of the variance in bond recovery rates aggregated across all seniority and ...

Default risk is the uncertainty surrounding a firm's ability to service its debts and obligations. Prior to default, there is no way to discriminate unambiguously between firms that will default and those that won't. At best we can only make probabilistic assessments of the likelihood of default. As a result, firms generally pay a spread over the default-free rate of interest that is proportion...

In this paper we consider the following inverse problem for the first hitting time distribution: given a Wiener process with a random initial state, probability distribution, F (t), and a linear boundary, b(t) = μt, find a distribution of the initial state such that the distribution of the first hitting time is F (t). This problem has important applications in credit risk modeling where the pro...

This paper seeks to establish empirically that institutions matter to financial markets. To this end, I look at the impact of five different regional trade agreements (RTAs) on a composite of four different financial instruments that account for default risk on sovereign debt in developing countries. As expected, some of the agreements have a stronger impact on default risk than others. Althoug...

Portfolios are constructed to increase returns and manage risk. In high-risk investment strategies, central measures of risk must be complemented with tail measures of risk. An unanticipated event impacting securities of one firm can contagiously affect those of other firms through a contagion flow process. The connections between firms due to a variety of factors can spread the contagion, and ...

We identify and estimate the sources of risk that cause corporate bonds to earn an excess return over default-free bonds. In particular, we estimate the risk premium associated with a default event. Default is modelled using a jump process with stochastic intensity. For a large set of firms, we model the default intensity of each firm as a function of common and firm-specific factors. In the mo...

In this paper, we examine differences in default risks for formal, informal and semi-formal loans and analyze the determinants of default risks regarding the three credit sources, using household data for Vietnam. We find that smaller-sized households with collateral and/or a guarantor borrow primarily from formal and semi-formal lenders whereas female contractors, large-sized households and bo...

∗We are extremely thankful for many constructive suggestions from Gurdip Bakshi, N. Chidambaran, Darrell Duffie, Rong Fan, Gifford Fong, John Knight, N. R. Prabhala, Jun Pan, Dmitry Pugachevsky, Shuyan Qi, Ken Singleton, Rangarajan Sundaram, Suresh Sundaresan and Haluk Unal. We received useful feedback from participants at various seminars: at the AIMR talks in Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney, the ...