Modeling credit risk with partial information

This paper provides an alternative approach to Duffie and Lando [Econometrica 69 (2001) 633–664] for obtaining a reduced form credit risk model from a structural model. Duffie and Lando obtain a reduced form model by constructing an economy where the market sees the manager’s information set plus noise. The noise makes default a surprise to the market. In contrast, we obtain a reduced form model by constructing an economy where the market sees a reduction of the manager’s information set. The reduced information makes default a surprise to the market. We provide an explicit formula for the default intensity based on an Azéma martingale, and we use excursion theory of Brownian motions to price risky debt.