Chronicle of a death foretold: does higher volatility anticipate corporate default?

Staff working papers set out research in progress by our staff, with the aim of encouraging comments and debate.
Published on 28 October 2022

Staff Working Paper No. 1,001

By Miguel Ampudia, Filippo Busetto and Fabio Fornari 

We test whether a simple measure of corporate insolvency based on equity return volatility – and denoted as Distance to Insolvency (DI) – delivers better predictions of corporate default than the widely-used Expected Default Frequency (EDF) measure computed by Moody’s. We look at the predictive power that current DIs and EDFs have for future defaults, both at a firm-level and at an aggregate level. At the granular level, both DIs and EDFs anticipate corporate defaults, but the DI contains information over and above the EDF, especially at longer forecasting horizons. At an aggregate level the DI shows superior forecasting power compared to the EDF, for horizons between three and twelve months. We illustrate the predictive power of the DI measure by examining how corporate defaults would have evolved during Covid-19 had the ECB not implemented the pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP).

Chronicle of a death foretold: does higher volatility anticipate
corporate default?