Swedish convertible bonds and their valuation

Abstract: Since 1980, many convertible bonds have been issued by Swedish companies. Most of these issues have been aimed at the employees. The great number of these employee issues gave rise to a new tax law. This tax law made it necessary to obtain a value on a convertible bond certificate at issue.In the first part of the dissertation, the institutional setting for the issuing of convertible bonds in Sweden is discussed. The relevant tax laws and recommendations given by different organizations are described. Also other features related to the issues are described. Furthermore, an empirical study of convertible bonds issues to emplyees in listed companies is carried out. The main purpose of the study is to quantify the volume of convertible bond issues to employees which have defaulted. Issues with a nominal value of around 500 million Swedish Crowns have been involved in some form of default.In this study, several models are compared to investigate whether the choice of model for valuing convertible bonds is important. These models all fall within the framework of Contingent Claims Analysis. Contingent Claims Analysis is an option based technique for determining the value of a claim whose payoffs depend upon the development of one or several underlying variables. In the study, it is shown in great detail how to set up and use those models.It is shown that the choice of model is important for the value of a convertible bond in certain situations. Those situations are identified by an empirical study of Swedish convertible bonds and through sensitivity analysis.