Fundamental Credit Analysis through Dynamical Modeling and Simulation of the Balance Sheet: Applications to Chinese Real Estate Developers

Jack Xu

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Fundamental credit analysis is widely performed by fixed income analysts and financial institutions to assess the credit risk of individual companies based on their financial data, notably the financial statements reported by the companies. Yet, the conventional analysis has not developed a computational method to forecast, directly from a company’s financial statements, the default probability, the recovery rate, and ultimately the fundamental valuation of a company’s credit risk in terms of credit spreads to risk-free rate. This paper introduces a generalizable approach to achieve these goals by implementing fundamental credit analysis in dynamical models. When combined with Monte-Carlo simulation, the current methodology naturally combines several novel features in the same forecast algorithm: 1. integrating default (defined as the state of negative cash) and recovery rate (under liquidation scenario) through the same defaulted balance sheet, 2. valuing the corporate real options manifested as planning in the amount of borrowing and expenditure, 3. embedding macro-economic and macro-financing conditions, and 4. forecasting the joint default risk of multiple companies. The method is applied to the Chinese real estate industry to forecast for several listed developers their forward default probabilities and associated recovery rates, and the fair-value par coupon curves of senior unsecured debt, using as inputs 6-8 years of their annual financial statements with 2020 as the latest. The results show both agreements and disagreements with the market-traded credit spreads at early April 2021, the time of these forecasts. The models forecasted much wider than market spreads on the big three developers, particularly pricing Evergrande in distressed levels. After setting up additional generic industry models, the current methodology is capable of computing default risk and debt valuation on large-scale of companies based on their historical financial statements.

Keywords: fundamental credit analysis; financial statement analysis; default forecasting; bond valuation; debt valuation; dynamical models; joint default; corporate real options (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C6 G17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-04-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-ban, nep-cmp and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/112699/1/MPRA_paper_112699.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:112699

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().