Copyright © 2006 R ecently, an unusually high number of firms in the economy defaulted, with the default rate for Moody’s-rated speculativegrade issuers reaching as high as 10.2% in 2001. In their annual review, Moody’s summarized these credit events as follows, “Record defaults —unmatched in number and dollar volume since the Great Depression—have culminated in the bankruptcies of well-known f...

We describe a two factor valuation model for convertible bonds when the firm may default. We endogenize both default and the recovery value of a defaulted bond. A sophisticated numerical framework enables us to specify numerically and financially consistent boundary conditions and inequality constraints. We investigate the affect of changing the default, recovery and loss specification. The aff...

How to forecast next year’s portfolio-wide credit default rate based on last year’s default observations and the current score distribution? A classical approach to this problem consists of fitting a mixture of the conditional score distributions observed last year to the current score distribution. This is a special (simple) case of a finite mixture model where the mixture components are fixed...

In this paper, we analyze the optimal default strategy of a firm when debt is convertible into equity. For this purpose, we consider a convertible consol bond in a time-independent model in the presence of bankruptcy costs and tax deductability. The optimal default and conversion strategy result from a game between equity and debt holders. We show that an optimal default of convertible debt occ...

The influence of gender, propaganda, and treatment methods was studied in relation to default behaviour of patients with sexually transmitted diseases. The overall default rate of men and women was similar, but a larger proportion of men defaulted after the initial visit, while the biggest fall-out in women was after the second attendance at the clinic. The institution of a propaganda campaign ...