Universiteit Utrecht

Department of Mathematics


The Term Structures of Credit Spreads Under Spectrally Negative Levy Processes



Budhi Arta Surya, Utrecht University, 7 July , 2004

Recently Hilberink and Rogers \cite{Hilberink} extend the work of Leland-Toft \cite{Leland} on the investigation of various properties of the debt and credit of a firm which keeps a constant profile of the debt and chooses its bankruptcy-triggering asset level $V_{B}$ endogeneously, to maximize the value of the equity. They let the underlying dynamics of the firm asset be driven by a class of stochastic processes having downward jumps and use Wiener-Hopf factorization to determine $V_{B}$, provided that the smooth-pasting condition applies. However, the condition of smooth-pasting as was shown in \cite{Kyprianou} does not always in general hold; a typical example will be a case in which the underlying process has bounded variation. Thus the determination of $V_{B}$ in this case is missing. This paper attempts to fill in the missing gap in determining $V_{B}$. We obtain closed-form results using the continuous-pasting condition together with scale function and a simple fluctuation identity which goes back to Darling, Ligget and Taylor \cite{Darling} which is recently used by Alili and Kyprianou \cite{Alili}.


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Budhi Arta Surya (surya@math.uu.nl)