Modeling and pricing credit risk with a focus on recovery risk

Abstract

Consider a defaultable bond traded in a financial market that is subject to shocks and regime shifts. Its recovery payment has a hybrid structure, comprising two components: one contingent on historical information up to the time of default, and the other an independent variable indexed by the regime at the time of default. The default intensity, interest rate, and reference rate are assumed to be general deterministic functions of certain state variables, while these state variables jointly follow a jump-diffusion process, with drift and volatility coefficients governed by the regime and with jumps induced by shocks. We construct a risk-neutral pricing measure that prices all risk sources in an integrated manner. A rigorous verification of this pricing measure reveals the corresponding time-dependent market prices of these risk sources. The resulting pricing framework is applicable to most defaultable bonds and credit derivatives.