Credit Risk Modeling under Conditional Volatility

Johannes Rohde and Philipp Sibbertsen

Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract: The accuracy of measuring credit risk directly decides on the interest on credit, which has to be paid when raising a credit, and the amount of capital to keep in reserve by a firm. The structural credit risk model proposed by Merton (1974) lays the groundwork for the assessment of a firm's credit risk by its default probability. Doubtlessly, the volatility of the firm's equity represents the most sensitive parameter influencing the default probability. By combining the Merton approach with conditional volatility models, we empirically examine in this article that the specification of conditional volatility affects the probability of default and therefor the credit rating. More precisely, we show on German stock market data that financial market data properties (i.e. asymmetric response of conditional volatility to return shocks and long-range dependencies within the conditional volatility) may not be neglected within the computation of credit risk. Moreover, the influence on the default probability by the type of conditional distribution is pointed out.

Keywords: Credit risk; Merton model; conditional volatility; default probability; stylized facts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 C58 G24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://diskussionspapiere.wiwi.uni-hannover.de/pdf_bib/dp-528.pdf (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:han:dpaper:dp-528

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Heidrich, Christian ().