Empirical Credit Risk Ratings of Individual Corporate Bonds and Derivation of Term Structures of Default Probabilities

Abstract

Undoubtedly, it is important to have an empirically effective credit risk rating method for decision-making in the financial industry, business, and even government. In our approach, for each corporate bond (CB) and its issuer, we first propose a credit risk rating (Crisk-rating) system with rating intervals for the standardized credit risk price spread (S-CRiPS) measure presented by Kariya et al. (2015), where credit information is based on the CRiPS measure, which is the difference between the CB price and its government bond (GB)-equivalent CB price. Second, for each Crisk-homogeneous class obtained through the Crisk-rating system, a term structure of default probability (TSDP) is derived via the CB-pricing model proposed in Kariya (2013), which transforms the Crisk level of each class into a default probability, showing the default likelihood over a future time horizon, in which 1545 Japanese CB prices, as of August 2010, are analyzed. To carry it out, the cross-sectional model of pricing government bonds with high empirical performance is required to get high-precision CRiPS and S-CRiPS measures. The effectiveness of our GB model and the S-CRiPS measure have been demonstrated with Japanese and United States GB prices in our papers and with an evaluation of the credit risk of the GBs of five countries in the EU and CBs issued by US energy firms in Kariya et al. (2016a, b). Our Crisk-rating system with rating intervals is tested with the distribution of the ratings of the 1545 CBs, a specific agency’s credit rating, and the ratings of groups obtained via a three-stage cluster analysis.

The Impact of Credit Rating Adjustments on Bond Spreads: Evidence from China

“…It serves as a crucial avenue for governments and enterprises to secure long-term funding and acts as the central platform for investors to diversify risks while maintaining and increasing the value of their assets. Credit ratings, as a pivotal measure for assessing the default risk of debt instruments, offer a lens through which the bond market is perceived (Kariya et al, 2019). These ratings enable investors to gain insight into complex financial information and gauge credit risk, establishing them as one of the core factors influencing bond pricing.…”

Utility Indifference Valuation for Defaultable Corporate Bond with Credit Rating Migration

“…Credit risk refers not only to default risk [7][8][9], but also to credit rating migration risk [10][11][12], where the latter has received more and more attention. Credit ratings influence the prices of corporate bonds [13][14][15]. How do we price the corporate bond in different credit ratings, and how does the bond change its price when its rating migrates?…”