On Infectious Models for Dependent Default Risk

Modeling dependent defaults is a key issue in risk measurement and management. In this paper, we introduce a Markovian infectious model to describe the dependent relationship of default processes of credit entities. The key idea of the proposed model is based on the concept of common shocks adopted in the insurance industry. We compare the proposed model to both one-sector and two-sector models considered in the credit literature using real default data. A log-likelihood ratio test is applied to compare the goodness-of-fit of the proposed model. Our empirical results reveal that the proposed model outperforms both the one-sector and two-sector models.