Sovereign CDS Calibration Under a Hybrid Sovereign Risk Model

ABSTRACT The European sovereign debt crisis, started in the second half of 2011, has posed the problem for asset managers, trades and risk managers to assess sovereign default risk. In the reduced form framework, it is necessary to understand the interrelationship between creditworthiness of a sovereign, its intensity to default and the correlation with the exchange rate between the bond’s currency and the currency in which the Credit Default Swap CDS spread are quoted. To do this, we propose a hybrid sovereign risk model in which the intensity of default is based on the jump to default extended constant elasticity variance model. We analyse the differences between the default intensity under the domestic and foreign measure and we compute the default-survival probabilities in the bond’s currency measure. We also give an approximation formula to CDS spread obtained by perturbation theory and provide an efficient method to calibrate the model to CDS spread quoted by the market. Finally, we test the model on real market data by several calibration experiments to confirm the robustness of our method.