This paper estimates recent default risk premia for U.S. corporate debt, based on a close relationship between default probabilities, as estimated by Moody's KMV EDFs, and default swap (CDS) market rates. The default-swap data, obtained through CIBC from 22 banks and specialty dealers, allow us to establish a strong link between actual and risk-neutral default probabilities for the 69 firms in the three sectors that we analyze: broadcasting and entertainment, healthcare, and oil and gas. We find dramatic variation over time in risk premia, from peaks in the third quarter of 2002, dropping by roughly 50% to late 2003.

Using data on corporate default experience in the U.S. and market rates of CDX index and tranche swaps of various maturities, we estimate reduced-form models of correlated default timing in the CDX High Yield and Investment Grade portfolios under actual and risk-neutral probabilities. The striking contrast between the estimated processes followed by the actual and risk-neutral arrival intensities of defaults, and between the parameters governing the actual and risk-neutral dynamics of the risk-neutral intensities, indicates the presence of substantial default risk premia in CDX swap market rates. The effects of risk premia on swap rates covary strongly across maturities, and depend on general stock market volatility and several measures of credit spreads. Large moves in the effects of these premia on swap rates have natural interpretations in terms of economic and financial market developments during the sample period, April 2004 to October 2007. Our results suggest that a large portion of the movements in CDX swap market rates observed during the sample period may be caused by changing attitudes towards correlated default risk rather than changes in the economic factors affecting the actual risk of clustered defaults, which ultimately governs swap payoffs.

Credit Default Swaps: A Survey is the most comprehensive review of all major research domains involving credit default swaps (CDS). CDS have been growing in importance in the global financial markets. However, their role has been hotly debated, in industry and academia, particularly since the credit crisis of 2007-2009. The authors review the extant literature on CDS that has accumulated over the past two decades and divide the survey into seven topics after providing a broad overview in the introduction. The second section traces the historical development of CDS markets and provides an introduction to CDS contract definitions and conventions. The third section discusses the pricing of CDS, from the perspective of no-arbitrage principles, structural, and reduced-form credit risk models. It also summarizes the literature on the determinants of CDS spreads, with a focus on the role of fundamental credit risk factors, liquidity and counterparty risk. The fourth section discusses how the development of the CDS market has affected the characteristics of the bond and equity markets, with an emphasis on market efficiency, price discovery, information flow, and liquidity. Attention is also paid to the CDS-bond basis, the wedge between the pricing of the CDS and its reference bond, and the mispricing between the CDS and the equity market. The fifth section examines the effect of CDS trading on firms' credit and bankruptcy risk, and how it affects corporate financial policy, including bond issuance, capital structure, liquidity management, and corporate governance. The sixth section analyzes how CDS impact the economic incentives of financial intermediaries. The seventh section reviews the growing literature on sovereign CDS and highlights the major differences between the sovereign and corporate CDS markets. The eighth section discusses CDS indices, especially the role of synthetic CDS index products backed by residential mortgage-backed securities during the financial crisis. The authors close with our suggestions for promising future research directions on CDS contracts and markets.

Timo Schläfer exploits the fact that differently-ranking debt instruments of the same issuer face identical default risk but different default-conditional recovery rates. He shows that this allows isolating recovery risk without any of the rigid assumptions employed by priors and implements his approach using credit default swap data.

The standard measures of distress risk ignore the fact that firm defaults are correlated and that some defaults are more likely to occur in bad times. The paper uses risk premium computed from corporate credit spreads to measure a firm's exposure to systematic variation in default risk. Unlike previously used measures that proxy for a firm's physical probability of default, credit spreads proxy for a risk-adjusted default probability and thereby explicitly account for the non-diversifiable component of distress risk. In contrast to prior findings in the literature, the authors find that stocks that have higher credit risk premia, that is stocks with higher systematic default risk exposures, have higher expected equity returns. Consistent with structural models of default, they show that the premium to a high-minus-low systematic default risk hedge portfolio is largely explained by the market factor. The authors confirm the robustness of these results by using an alternative systematic default risk factor for firms that do not have bonds outstanding. The results show no evidence of firms with high systematic default risk exposure delivering anomalously low returns.

It has been 15 years since the first edition of Stochastic Integration and Differential Equations, A New Approach appeared, and in those years many other texts on the same subject have been published, often with connections to applications, especially mathematical finance. Yet in spite of the apparent simplicity of approach, none of these books has used the functional analytic method of presenting semimartingales and stochastic integration. Thus a 2nd edition seems worthwhile and timely, though it is no longer appropriate to call it "a new approach". The new edition has several significant changes, most prominently the addition of exercises for solution. These are intended to supplement the text, but lemmas needed in a proof are never relegated to the exercises. Many of the exercises have been tested by graduate students at Purdue and Cornell Universities. Chapter 3 has been completely redone, with a new, more intuitive and simultaneously elementary proof of the fundamental Doob-Meyer decomposition theorem, the more general version of the Girsanov theorem due to Lenglart, the Kazamaki-Novikov criteria for exponential local martingales to be martingales, and a modern treatment of compensators. Chapter 4 treats sigma martingales (important in finance theory) and gives a more comprehensive treatment of martingale representation, including both the Jacod-Yor theory and Emery’s examples of martingales that actually have martingale representation (thus going beyond the standard cases of Brownian motion and the compensated Poisson process). New topics added include an introduction to the theory of the expansion of filtrations, a treatment of the Fefferman martingale inequality, and that the dual space of the martingale space H^1 can be identified with BMO martingales. Solutions to selected exercises are available at the web site of the author, with current URL http://www.orie.cornell.edu/~protter/books.html.