Bayesian Estimation of Corporate Default Spreads

Risk-averse investors often wish to exclude stocks from their portfolios that bear high credit risk, which is a measure of a firm's likelihood of bankruptcy. This risk is commonly estimated by constructing signals from quarterly accounting items, such as debt and income volatility. While such information may provide a rich description of a firm's credit risk, the low-frequency with which the data is released implies that investors may be operating with outdated information. In this paper we circumvent this problem by developing a high-frequency credit risk proxy via corporate default spreads which are estimated from daily bond price data. We accomplish this by adapting classic yield curve estimation methods to a corporate bond setting, leveraging advances in Bayesian estimation to ensure higher model stability when working with small sample data which also allows us to directly model the uncertainty of our predictions.