Estimating Structural Models of Corporate Bond Prices

Author(s):  
Max Bruche
Author(s):  
Kelly E. Carter

This chapter covers the fundamentals of corporate bond markets. It begins by highlighting the size and importance of these markets, followed by a discussion of the major types of corporate bonds and the process of issuing bonds. Next, the chapter provides a discussion of important relationships between a bond’s price and market interest rates, including the key observation that bond prices move opposite market interest rates. The next topic focuses on duration and convexity, which are techniques to estimate the dollar and percent changes in bond prices for a given change in market interest rates, followed by a discussion of bond immunization, which is a technique used to protect the value of bond portfolios from adverse changes in market interest rates. The final topics covered concern yield curves, credit ratings, and the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010 on corporate bond markets.


2015 ◽  
Vol 05 (03) ◽  
pp. 1550007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Ericsson ◽  
Joel Reneby ◽  
Hao Wang

Using a set of structural models, we evaluate the price of default protection for a sample of US corporations. In contrast to previous evidence from corporate bond data, credit default swap (CDS) premia are not systematically underestimated. In fact, one of our studied models has little difficulty on average in predicting their level. For robustness, we perform the same exercise for bond spreads by the same issuers on the same trading date. As expected, bond spreads relative to the treasury curve are systematically underestimated. This is not the case when the swap curve is used as a benchmark, suggesting that previously documented underestimation results may be sensitive to the choice of risk-free rate.


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