A statistical modeling methodology for the analysis of term structure of credit risk and its dependency

This paper presents a statistical modeling methodology for simultaneous estimation of the term structure for the risk-free interest rate, hazard rate, loss given default as well as credit risk dependency structure between bond-issuing industries. Amodel like this provides a realistic view for the market anticipation of credit risk for corporate bonds and the flexibility in capturing credit risk dependency between industries. Our statistical modeling procedure is carried out without specifying the model likelihood explicitly, and thus robust to the model mis-specification. An empirical analysis is conducted using the financial infor- mation on the Japanese bond market data. Numerical results confirm the practicality of the proposed methodology.