Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/142499 
Year of Publication: 
2004
Series/Report no.: 
EERI Research Paper Series No. 5/2004
Publisher: 
Economics and Econometrics Research Institute (EERI), Brussels
Abstract: 
Reliability has been largely applied to industrial systems in order to study the various possibilities of systems’ failure. The goal is to establish the chain of events leading to any system’s failure, namely the top event. Looking for the minimal paths leading to any system’s fault allows for a better control of systems’ safety. To this end, reliability is composed of a static approach as well as a dynamic approach. In this paper, we extend the canonical framework allowing for the application of fault tree theory to credit risk assessment. The author explains that fault tree is one alternative approach of reliability, which matches default risk analysis in a simple framework. Our extension includes other distributions of probability to model the lifetimes of French firms while studying the related empirical default probabilities. We use mainly, but not exclusively, continuous distributions. Our results exhibit both the exponential nature of French .rms. lifetimes as well as strong convex and fast decreasing time varying failure rates. Such a feature has some non-negligible impact insofar as it characterizes corresponding credit spreads’ Term structure.
Subjects: 
Credit risk
default probability
failure rate
fault tree
reliability
survival
JEL: 
C1
D8
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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