Credit Risk in Corporate Securities and Derivatives valuation and optimal capital structure choice

Abstract: This volume consists of four papers, which in principle could be read in any order. The common denominator is that they deal with contingent claims models of a firm's securities or related derivatives.A Framework for Valuing Corporate SecuritiesEarly applications of contingent claims analysis to the pricing of corporate liabilities tend to restrict themselves to situations where debt is perpetual or where financial distress can only occur at debt maturity. This paper relaxes these restrictions and provides an exposition of how most corporate liabilities can be valued as packages of two fundamental barrier contingent claims: a down-and-out call and a binary option. Furthermore, it is shown how the comparative statics of the resulting pricing formulae can be derived.A New Compound Option Pricing ModelThis paper extends the Geske (1979) compound option pricing model to the case where the security on which the option is written is a down-and-out call as opposed to a standard Black and Scholes call. Furthermore, we develop a general and flexible framework for valuing options on more complex packages of contingent claims - any claim that can be valued using the ideas in chapter 1. This allows us to study the interaction between the detailed characteristics of a firm's capital structure and the prices of for example stock options.Implementing Firm Value Based ModelsThis paper evaluates an implementation procedure for contingent claims models suggested by Duan (1994). Duan's idea is to use time series data of traded securities such as shares of common stock in order to estimate the dynamics of the firm's asset value. Furthermore, we provide an argument which allows us to relax the (common) assumption that the firm's assets may be continuously traded. It is sufficient to assume that the firm's assets are traded at one particular point in time.Asset Substitution, Debt Pricing, Optimal Leverage and MaturityChapters 1-3 have focused on the problem of pricing corporate securities.They have thus abstracted strategic aspects of corporate finance theory. This paper is an attempt to combine the contingent claims literature with the non-dynamic corporate finance literature. I allow the management of the firm to alter its investment policy strategically. This yields a model which allows us to examine the relationship between bond prices, agency costs, optimal leverage and maturity.