The notion of class is widely used in systems analysis and data modeling methodologies and is fundatnental to emergitig object-oriented approaches. However, there are no theory-based guidelines for evaluating the quality of a collection of classes selected to model an application. In this paper, we assume that the class is used as a modeling construct in an effort to follow more closely the way...

In this paper, we investigate whether the theoretical default probability measures calculated from Merton’s (1974) structural credit risk model can provide a better way to explain and predict credit rating than traditional statistical models. The empirical results suggest that Merton’s theoretical default measure is not a sufficient statistic of equity market information concerning credit quali...