Modeling Credit Contagion via the Updating of Fragile Beliefs

Luca Benzoni; Pierre Collin-Dufresne; Robert S. Goldstein; Jean Helwege

doi:10.1093/rfs/hhv018

Modeling Credit Contagion via the Updating of Fragile Beliefs

Luca Benzoni¹; Pierre Collin-Dufresne²; Robert S. Goldstein³; Jean Helwege⁴

¹ Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago · ² Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and SFI · ³ University of Minnesota and NBER · ⁴ University of California at Riverside

Review of Financial Studies 2015 open access

We propose an equilibrium model for defaultable bonds that are subject to contagion risk. Contagion arises because agents with “fragile beliefs” are uncertain about the underlying economic state and its probability. Estimation on sovereign European credit default swaps (CDS) data shows that agents require a time-varying risk premium for bearing state uncertainty. The model outperforms affine specifications with the same number of state variables, suggesting that there are important nonlinearities in credit spreads that are captured by our model. Contagion drives most of the variation in CDS spreads, especially before the crisis. However, economic fundamentals account for a significant fraction during the crisis.

DOI: 10.1093/rfs/hhv018
Volume: 28 (7)
Pages: 1960-2008
Language: en
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