Pricing of swaps with default risk

In this paper, I study the valuation of interest rate and currency swaps with default risk under the contingent claim analysis framework. I demonstrate that the traditional approach of pricing swap contracts as exchanges of loans underestimates the value of such contracts to the counterparty with higher credit rating and exaggerates the credit spread required to guard against default risk. Numerical simulations show that the swap rate is not sensitive to counterparty credit rating: for a ten year interest rate swap, a one hundred basis point increase in counterparty bond yield spread results in only about one basis point increase in the swap rate. (JEL G10, G12, G13)This paper is based on Chapter 2 of my Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University. I would like to thank my dissertation committee, Kenneth French, Roger Ibbotson, and Jonathan Ingersoll, Jr. (chairman), for helpful advice and guidance. I would also like to thank Keny Back, Richard Lindsey, N. R. Prabhala, Ming Huang, Marti Subrahmanyam, three anonymous referees and especially Bob Jarrow, the editor, for helpful comments and suggestions. Any errors that remain are solely mine. This paper won the 1996 Trefftzs Award for best student paper from the Western Finance Association.