Pricing Credit Default Swap Subject to Counterparty Risk and Collateralization
Pricing Credit Default Swap Subject to Counterparty Risk and Collateralization
Tim Xiao
ABSTRACT
This article presents a new model for valuing a credit default swap (CDS) contract that is affected by multiple credit risks of the buyer, seller and reference entity. We show that default dependency has a significant impact on asset pricing. In fact, correlated default risk is one of the most pervasive threats in financial markets. We also show that a fully collateralized CDS is not equivalent to a risk-free one. In other words, full collateralization cannot eliminate counterparty risk completely in the CDS market.
Key Words: valuation model; credit risk modeling; collateralization; correlation, CDS.
Introduction
There are two primary types of models that attempt to describe default processes in the literature: structural models and reduced-form (or intensity) models. Many practitioners in the credit trading arena have tended to gravitate toward the reduced-from models given their mathematical tractability.
Central to the reduced-form models is the assumption that multiple defaults are independent conditional on the state of the economy. In reality, however, the default of one party might affect the default probabilities of other parties. Collin-Dufresne et al. (2003) and Zhang and Jorion (2007) find that a major credit event at one firm is associated with significant increases in the credit spreads of other firms. Giesecke (2004), Das et al. (2006), and Lando and Nielsen (2010) find that a defaulting firm can weaken the firms in its network of business links. These findings have important implications for the management of credit risk portfolios, where default relationships need to be explicitly modeled.
The main drawback of the conditionally independent assumption or the reduced-form models is that the range of default correlations that can be achieved is typically too low when compared with empirical default correlations (see Das et al. (2007)). The responses to correct this weakness can be generally classified into two categories: endogenous default relationship approaches and exogenous default relationship approaches.
The endogenous approaches include the contagion (or infectious) models and frailty models. The frailty models (see Duffie et al. (2009), Koopman et al. (2011), etc) describe default clustering based on some unobservable explanatory variables. In variations of contagion or infectious type models (see Davis and Lo (2001), Jarrow and Yu (2001), etc.), the assumption of conditional independence is relaxed and default intensities are made to depend on default events of other entities. Contagion and frailty models fill an important gap but at the cost of analytic tractability. They can be especially difficult to implement for large portfolios.
The exogenous approaches (see Li (2000), Laurent and Gregory (2005), Hull and White (2004), Brigo et al. (2011), etc) attempt to link marginal default probability distributions to the joint default probability distribution through some external functions. Due to their simplicity in use, practitioners lean toward the exogenous ones.
Given a default model, one can value a risky derivative contract and compute credit value adjustment (CVA) that is a relatively new area of financial derivative modeling and trading. CVA is the expected loss arising from the default of a counterparty (see Brigo and Capponi (2008), Lipton and Sepp (2009), Pykhtin and Zhu (2006), Gregory (2009), Bielecki et al (2013) and Crepey (2015), Xiao (2015), Xiao (2017), etc.)
Collateralization as one of the primary credit risk mitigation techniques becomes increasingly important and widespread in derivatives transactions. According the ISDA (2013), 73.7% of all OTC derivatives trades (cleared ad non-cleared) are subject to collateral agreements. For large firms, the figure is 80.7%. On an asset class basis, 83.0% of all CDS transactions and 79.2% of all fixed income transactions are collateralized. For large firms, the figures are 96.3% and 89.4%, respectively. Previous studies on collateralization include Johannes and Sundaresan (2007), Fuijii and Takahahsi (2012), Piterbarg (2010), Bielecki, et al (2013) and Hull and White (2014), etc.
This paper presents a new framework for valuing defaultable financial contracts with or without collateral arrangements. The framework characterizes default dependencies exogenously, and models collateral processes directly based on the fundamental principals of collateral agreements. For brevity we focus on CDS contracts, but many of the points we make are equally applicable to other derivatives. CDS has trilateral credit risk, where three parties – buyer, seller and reference entity – are defaultable.
In general, a CDS contract is used to transfer the credit risk of a reference entity from one party to another. The risk circularity that transfers one type of risk (reference credit risk) into another (counterparty credit risk) within the CDS market is a concern for financial stability. Some people claim that the CDS market has increased financial contagion or even propose an outright ban on these instruments.
The standard CDS pricing model in the market assumes that there is no counterparty risk. Although this oversimplified model may be accepted in normal market conditions, its reliability in times of distress has recently been questioned. In fact, counterparty risk has become one of the most dangerous threats to the CDS market. For some time now it has been realized that, in order to value a CDS properly, counterparty effects have to be taken into account (see ECB (2009)).
We bring the concept of comvariance into the area of credit risk modeling to capture the statistical relationship among three or more random variables. Comvariance was first introduced to economics by Deardorff (1982), who used this measurement to correlate three factors in international trading. Furthermore, we define a new statistics, comrelation, as a scaled version of comvariance. Accounting for default correlations and comrelations becomes important in determining CDS premia, especially during the credit crisis. Our analysis shows that the effect of default dependencies on a CDS premium from large to small accordingly is i) the default correlation between the protection seller and the reference entity, ii) the default comrelation, iii) the default correlation between the protection buyer and the reference entity, and iv) the default correlation between the protection buyer and the protection seller. In particular, we find that the default comvariance/comrelation has substantial effects on the asset pricing and risk management, which have never been documented.
There is a significant increase in the use of collateral for CDS after the recent financial crises. Many people believe that, if a CDS is fully collateralized, there is no risk of failure to pay. Collateral posting regimes are originally designed and utilized for bilateral risk products, e.g., interest rate swap (IRS), but there are many reasons to be concerned about the success of collateral posting in offsetting the risk of CDS contracts. First, the value of CDS contracts tends to move very suddenly with big jumps, whereas the price movements of IRS contracts are far smoother and less volatile than CDS prices. Second, CDS spreads can widen very rapidly. Third, CDS contracts have many more risk factors than IRS contracts. In fact, our model shows that full collateralization cannot eliminate counterparty risk completely for a CDS contract.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Pricing multilateral defaultable financial contract is elaborated on in Section 2; numerical results are provided in Section 3; the conclusions are presented in Section 4. All proofs and some detailed derivations are contained in the appendices.
Pricing Financial Contracts Subject to Multiple Credit Risks
It is well-known that the survival probability from time t to s in this framework is defined by
The default probability for the period (t, s) in this framework is given by
There is ample evidence that corporate defaults are correlated. The default of a firm’s counterparty might affect its own default probability. Thus, default correlation/dependence occurs due to the counterparty relations.
The interest in the financial industry for the modeling and pricing of multilateral defaultable instruments arises mainly in two respects: in the management of credit risk at a portfolio level and in the valuation of credit derivatives. Central to the valuation and risk management of credit derivatives and risky portfolios is the problem of default relationship.
Let us discuss a three-party case first. A CDS is a good example of a trilateral defaultable instrument where the three parties are counterparties A, B and reference entity C. In a standard CDS contract one party purchases credit protection from another party, to cover the loss of the face value of a reference entity following a credit event. The protection buyer makes periodic payments to the seller until the maturity date or until a credit event occurs. A credit event usually requires a final accrual payment by the buyer and a loss protection payment by the protection seller. The protection payment is equal to the difference between par and the price of the cheapest to deliver (CTD) asset of the reference entity on the face value of the protection.
A CDS is normally used to transfer the credit risk of a reference entity between two counterparties. The contract reduces the credit risk of the reference entity but gives rise to another form of risk: counterparty risk. Since the dealers are highly concentrated within a small group, any of them may be too big to fail. The interconnected nature, with dealers being tied to each other through chains of OTC derivatives, results in increased contagion risk. Due to its concentration and interconnectedness, the CDS market seems to pose a systemic risk to financial market stability. In fact, the CDS is blamed for playing a pivotal role in the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the disintegration of AIG.
For years, a widespread practice in the market has been to mark CDS to market without taking the counterparty risk into account. The realization that even the most prestigious investment banks could go bankrupt has shattered the foundation of the practice. It is wiser to face frankly the real complexities of pricing a CDS than to indulge in simplifications that have proved treacherous. For some time now it has been realized that, in order to value a CDS properly, counterparty effects have to be taken into account.
where
We introduce the concept of comvariance into credit risk modeling arena to exploit any statistical relationship among multiple random variables. Furthermore, we define a new statistic, comrelation, as a scaled version of comvariance (just like correlation is a scaled version of covariance) as follows:
According to the Holder inequality, we have
Obviously, the comrelation is in the range of [-1, 1]. Given the comrelation, Equation (3i) can be rewritten as
More generally, we define the comrelation in the context of n random variables as
2.1 Risky valuation without collateralization
Proposition 1: The value of the CDS is given by
Proof: See the Appendix.
Corollary 1: If counterparties A and B are default-free, the value of the CDS is given by
2.2 Risky valuation with collateralization
Collateralization is the most important and widely used technique in practice to mitigate credit risk. The posting of collateral is regulated by the Credit Support Annex (CSA) that specifies a variety of terms including the threshold, the independent amount, and the minimum transfer amount (MTA), etc. The threshold is the unsecured credit exposure that a party is willing to bear. The minimum transfer amount is the smallest amount of collateral that can be transferred. The independent amount plays the same role as the initial margin (or haircuts).
In a typical collateral procedure, a financial instrument is periodically marked-to-market and the collateral is adjusted to reflect changes in value. The collateral is called as soon as the mark-to-market (MTM) value rises above the given collateral threshold, or more precisely, above the threshold amount plus the minimum transfer amount. Thus, the collateral amount posted at time t is given by
The main role of collateral should be viewed as an improved recovery in the event of a counterparty default. According to Bankruptcy law, if there has been no default, the collateral is returned to the collateral giver by the collateral taker. If a default occurs, the collateral taker possesses the collateral. In other words, collateral does not affect the survival payment; instead, it takes effect on the default payment only.
According to the ISDA (2013), almost all CDSs are fully collateralized. Many people believe that full collateralization can eliminate counterparty risk completely for CDS.
Collateral posting regimes are originally designed and utilized for bilateral risk products, e.g., IRS, but there are many reasons to be concerned about the success of collateral posting in offsetting the risks of CDS contracts. First, the values of CDS contracts tend to move very suddenly with big jumps, whereas the price movements of IRS contracts are far smoother and less volatile than CDS prices. Second, CDS spreads can widen very rapidly. The amount of collateral that one party is required to provide at short notice may, in some cases, be close to the notional amount of the CDS and may therefore exceed that party’s short-term liquidity capacity, thereby triggering a liquidity crisis. Third, CDS contracts have many more risk factors than IRS contracts.
or
where
Proposition 2: If a CDS is fully collateralized, the risky value of the CDS is NOT equal to the counterparty-risk-free value, as shown in equation (15).
Numerical Results
Our goal in this section is to study the quantitative relationship between CDS premia and the credit quality of counterparties and reference entities, including the default correlations and comrelations.
In our study, we choose a new 5-year CDS with a quarterly payment frequency. Two counterparties are denoted as A and B. Counterparty A buys a protection from counterparty B. All calculations are from the perspective of party A. By definition, a breakeven CDS spread is a premium that makes the market value of a given CDS at inception zero.
The current (spot) market data are shown in Table 1 provide by FinPricing (2018). Assume that the reference entity C has an “A+200bps” credit quality throughout this subsection. The 5-year counterparty-risk-free CDS premium is 0.027 (equals the 5-year ‘A’ rated CDS spread in Table 1 plus 200 basis points).
Since the payoffs of a CDS are mainly determined by credit events, we need to characterize the evolution of the hazard rates. Here we choose the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (CIR) model. The CIR process has been widely used in the literature of credit risk and is given by
Table 1: Current/spot market data
This table displays the current (spot) market data used for all calculations in this paper, including the term structure of continuously compounded interest rates, the term structure of A-rated breakeven CDS spreads, and the curve of at-the-money caplet volatilities.
Table 2: Risk-neutral parameters for CIR model
This table presents the risk-neutral parameters that are calibrated to the current market shown in Table 1. ‘A+100bps’ represents a ‘100 basis points’ parallel shift in the A-rated CDS spreads.
The calibrated parameters are shown in table 2. We assume that interest rates are deterministic and select the regression-based Monte-Carlo simulation (see Longstaff and Schwartz (2001)) to perform risky valuation.
Table 3: Impact of the credit quality of the protection buyer on CDS premia
This table shows how the CDS premium increases as the credit quality of party A decreases. The 1st data column represents the counterparty-risk-free results. For the remaining columns, we assume that party B is risk-free and party A is risky. ‘A+100bps’ represents a ‘100 basis points’ parallel shift in the A-rated CDS spreads. The results in the row ‘Difference from Risk-Free’ = current CDS premium – counterparty-risk-free CDS premium.
Table 4: Impact of the credit quality of the protection seller on CDS premia
This table shows the decrease in the CDS premium with the credit quality of party B. The 1st data column represents the counterparty-risk-free results. For the remaining columns, we assume that party A is risk-free and party B is risky. ‘A+100bps’ represents a ‘100 basis points’ parallel shift in the A-rated CDS spreads. The results in the row ‘Difference from Risk-Free’ = current CDS premium – counterparty-risk-free CDS premium.
From table 3 and 4, we find that a credit spread of about 100 basis points maps into a CDS premium of about 0.4 basis points for counterparty A and about -0.7 basis points for counterparty B. The credit impact on the CDS premia is approximately linear. As would be expected, i) the dealer’s credit quality has a larger impact on CDS premia than the investor’s credit quality; ii) the higher the investor’s credit risk, the higher the premium that the dealer charges; iii) the higher the dealer’s credit risk, the lower the premium that the dealer asks. Without considering default correlations and comrelations, we find that, in general, the impact of counterparty risk on CDS premia is relatively small. This is in line with the empirical findings of Arora, Gandhi, and Longstaff (2009).
Figure 1: Impact of default correlations and comrelation on CDS premia
4 Conclusion
This article presents a new valuation framework for pricing financial instruments subject to credit risk. In particular, we focus on modeling default relationships.
To capture the default relationships among more than two defaultable entities, we introduce a new statistic: comrelation, an analogue to correlation for multiple variables, to exploit any multivariate statistical relationship. Our research shows that accounting for default correlations and comrelations becomes important, especially under market stress. The existing valuation models in the credit derivatives market, which take into account only pair-wise default correlations, may underestimate credit risk and may be inappropriate.
We study the sensitivity of the price of a defaultable instrument to changes in the joint credit quality of the parties. For instance, our analysis shows that the effect of default dependence on CDS premia from large to small is the correlation between the protection seller and the reference entity, the comrelation, the correlation between the protection buyer and the reference entity, and the correlation between the protection buyer and the protection seller.
The model shows that a fully collateralized CDS is not equivalent to a risk-free one. Therefore, we conclude that collateralization designed to mitigate counterparty risk works well for financial instruments subject to bilateral credit risk, but fails for ones subject to multilateral credit risk.
Appendix
Table A_1. Payoffs of a trilaterally defaultable CDS
The risky price is the discounted expectation of the payoffs and is given by
where
Similarly, we have
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