A Contingent Claims Analysis of the Interest Rate Risk Characteristics of Corporate Liabilities
28 Pages Posted: 30 Apr 2007
Date Written: January 1996
Abstract
This paper provides a contingent claims analysis of the interest rate risk characteristics of corporate liabilities by identifying Merton's (1973) option pricing model with Vasicek's (1977) mean reverting term structure model. Only a non-zero positive range of duration values for the firms' assets is shown to be consistent with the previous empirical evidence on the interest rate sensitivity of corporate stocks and bonds. Chance's (1990) duration measure is shown to be biased downward under empirically realistic conditions. Theoretical conditions are derived under which the duration of a default-prone zero coupon bond can be either higher or lower than the duration of the corresponding default-free bond. The duration of the default-prone bond of a firm with high (low) interest rate sensitive assets is shown to be an increasing (decreasing) function of the bond's default-risk.
Keywords: Interest rate risk, stocks, bonds, duration, Merton, Vasicek
JEL Classification: G1, G10, G12, G13, G21, G32
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure
-
Risk, the Pricing of Capital Assets, and the Evaluation of Investment Portfolios
-
The Option Pricing Model and the Risk Factor of Stock
By Dan Galai and Ronald W. Masulis
-
Tests of Capital Market Theory and Implications of the Evidence
-
By Anwer S. Ahmed, Carolyn Takeda, ...
-
Optimal Utilization of Market Forecasts and the Evaluation of Investment Performance
-
A Comparison between the European and the U.S. Mutual Fund Industry
By Rogér Otten and Mark Schweitzer