The goal of these lectures is to present a survey of recent developments in the practically important and challenging area of hedging credit risk. In a companion work, Bielecki et al. (2004a), we presented techniques and results related to the valuation of defaultable claims. It should be emphasized that in most existing papers on credit risk, the risk-neutral valuation of defaultable claims is...

What is a benchmark bond? We provide a formal theoretical treatment of this concept that relates endogenously determined benchmark status to price discovery and we derive its implications. We describe an econometric technique for identifying the benchmark that is congruent with our theoretical framework. We apply this to the US corporate bond market and to the natural experiment that occurred w...

This paper studies the pricing of intensity-based defaultable bonds where the volatility of default intensity is assumed to be random and driven by two different factors varying on fast and slow time scales. Corrections to the constant intensity of default are obtained and then how these corrections influence the term structure of interest rate derivatives is shown. The results indicate that th...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a 1993 relaxation of the restrictions governing the underwriting operations of Japanese banks on bond issues in the Euro–yen and Japanese corporate bond markets. Evidence is presented to suggest that the relaxation of the restrictions governing the underwriting operations of Japanese banks was associated with a significant fall in spreads in...

This paper explores the role of liquidity risk in the pricing of corporate bonds. We show that corporate bond returns have significant exposures to fluctuations in treasury bond liquidity and equity market liquidity. Further, this liquidity risk is a priced factor for the expected returns on corporate bonds, and the associated liquidity risk premia help to explain the credit spread puzzle. In t...

This paper presents a theoretical model of default risk in the context of the ``market'' model approach to interest rate dynamics. We propose a model for ®nite-interval interest rates (such as LIBOR) which explicitly takes into account the possibility of default through the in ̄uence of a point process with deterministic intensity. We relate the defaultable interest rate to the non-defaultable i...

The part of credit spread that is not explained by corporate credit risk forecasts future economic activity. I show that the link with aggregate business risk and bond liquidity risk explains this finding. Once I project spreads on these two risk factors, which are readily measurable with the daily frequency, in addition to corporate credit risk, the forecasting power of the residual spread red...

A standard assumption of structural models of default is that firms assets evolve exogenously. In this paper, we document the importance of accounting for investment options in models of credit risk. In the presence of financing and investment frictions, firm-level variables which proxy for asset composition carry explanatory power for credit spreads beyond leverage. As a result, cross-sectiona...

Taking advantage of a unique corporate bond transaction dataset from the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), this paper investigates whether information-based trading takes place in the high-yield corporate bond market, and how firm-specific information flow across related securities, including stocks, options and corporate bonds. Differing from previous studies, I find that curr...

In this paper, the author discusses the distribution of the jump-diffusion CIR model (JCIR) and its applications in credit risk. Applying the piecewise deterministic Markov process theory and martingale theory, we first obtain the closed forms of the Laplace transforms for the distribution of the jump-diffusion CIR model and its integrated process. Based on the obtained Laplace transforms, we d...