On a Multivariate Markov Chain Model for Credit Risk Measurement

In this paper, we use credibility theory to estimate credit transition matrices in a multivariate Markov chain model for credit rating. A transition matrix is estimated by a linear combination of the prior estimate of the transition matrix and the empirical transition matrix. These estimates can be easily computed by solving a set of Linear Programming (LP) problems. The estimation procedure can be implemented easily on Excel spreadsheets without requiring much computational effort and time. The number of parameters is O(s2m2), where s is the dimension of the categorical time series for credit ratings and m is the number of possible credit ratings for a security. Numerical evaluations of credit risk measures based on our model are presented.