From the decompositions of a stopping time to risk premium decompositions^*

Department of Banking and Finance University of Zürich, Plattenstrasse 32 Zürich 8032, Switzerland

Abstract

The occurrence of some events can impact asset prices and produce losses. The amplitude of these losses are partly determined by the degree of predictability of those events by the market investors, as risk premiums build up in an asset price as a compensation of the anticipated losses. The aim of this paper is to propose a general framework where these phenomena can be properly defined and quantified.

Our focus are the default events and the defaultable assets, but the framework could apply to any event whose occurrence impacts some asset prices.

We provide the general construction of a default time under the so called (H) hypothesis, which reveals a useful way in which default models can be built, using both market factors and idiosyncratic factors. All the relevant characteristics of a default time (i.e. the Azéma supermartingale and its Doob-Meyer decomposition) are explicitly computed given the information about these factors.

We then define the default event risk premiums and the default adjusted probability measure. These concepts are useful for pricing defaultable claims in a framework that includes possible economic shocks, such as jumps of the recovery process or of some default-free assets at the default time. These formulas are not classic and we point out that the knowledge of the default compensator (or the intensity process when the default time is totally inaccessible) is not a sufficient quantity for finding explicit prices; the Azéma supermartingale and its Doob-Meyer decomposition are needed. The progressive enlargement of a filtration framework is the right tool for pricing defaultable claims in non standard frameworks where non defaultable assets or recovery processes may react at the default event.