In: Finance
The current 1-year spot rate on a treasury bill is 4.25% and the current 1-year spot rate on a BB-rated bond of equivalent risk to a prospective loan is 11.55%. The bond has a marginal probability of default in year 2 of 8.5% 11. What is the marginal probability of default in year 1? (3 points) 12. What is the cumulative probability of default over the 2 years? (4 points)
11
The formula to calculate marginal probability of default is given as:
Where is the risk free rate or spot rate on treasury bill and is the spot rate on risky asset. This formula is derived by assuming that an investor would be indifferent between return on a risky asset multiplied by its probability of repayment (which is equal to 1 - probability of default) and return on a risk less asset.
Substituting values given in the question, we get:
which is equal to 0.0654 or 6.54%
12
The formula to calculate cumulative probability of default is:
Where and are marginal probabilities of default in years 1 and 2 respectively. The intuitive sense of the formula is that we are trying to calculate the cumulative probability of repayment by multiplying probabilities of repayment in both years 1 and 2 and then we are subtracting that from 1 to calculate cumulative probability of default.
plugging in the values we get
or 14.48%