As companies and investors globalize, we are increasingly faced with estimation questions about the risk associated with this globalization. When investors invest in China Mobile, Infosys or Vale, they may be rewarded with higher returns, but they are also exposed to additional risk. When Siemens and Apple push for growth in Asia and Latin America, they clearly are exposed to the political and economic turmoil that often characterize these markets. In practical terms, how, if at all, should we adjust for this additional risk? We will begin the paper with an overview of overall country risk, its sources and measures. We will continue with a discussion of sovereign default risk and examine sovereign ratings and credit default swaps (CDS) as measures of that risk. We will extend that discussion to look at country risk from the perspective of equity investors, by looking at equity risk premiums for different countries and consequences for valuation. In the fourth section, we argue that a company’s exposure to country risk should not be determined by where it is incorporated and traded. By that measure, neither Coca Cola nor Nestle are exposed to country risk. Exposure to country risk should come from a company’s operations, making country risk a critical component of the valuation of almost every large multinational corporation. In the final section, we will also look at how to move across currencies in valuation and capital budgeting, and how to avoid mismatching errors.

This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, through the calculation of “binomial correlation measure”, we suggest that from the perspective of default correlation it would be better to use structural approach rather than reduced form approach for pricing derivatives with two counterparties and its CVA calculation unless default intensities follow jump-diffusion process in latter one. In the second part, we derive the pricing model for CDS with counterparty risk and its CVA calculation by Black-Cox first passage time model in structural approach. Different from most of the previous paper our recovery is based on the CDS with counterparty risk, so the pricing model is a boundary-value problem of fully-nonlinear PDE. To solve it, we introduce an approximation problem by penalty model in reduced form approach by assuming an incentive function. Also finite element method and iteration approach are used. The numerical results show the convergence of approximation problem, iteration problem and finite element method, a comparison between CVA with different recovery rules and also the impact of wrong-way risk and right-way risk on CVA.

Although bank loans themselves are somewhat illiquid because of private information, most of their cashflows are not. Recent financial innovations allow commercial loans to be liquefied via credit derivatives and actual and synthetic securitizations. The loan originating bank holds the remaining illiquid tranche containing the concentrated credit risk, private information rent and the “excess spread” that incentivize the bank to continue to monitor and service the loans. Empirically, we find that the average size of the residual tranche is about 3%, which reflects the size of the “market determined capital” necessary to support the liquefaction. The liquefaction of bank loans makes possible a banking system that restricts the guaranteed accounts to be backed by 100% reserves and the non-guaranteed deposits to be backed by liquid securitized loan tranches, while retaining the deposit-lending synergy. Such a system is perfectly safe without deposit insurance and it renders banks bankruptcy-remote without sacrificing a bank’s traditional role as a financial intermediary.

Although bank loans themselves are somewhat illiquid because of private information, most of their cashflows are not. Recent financial innovations allow commercial loans to be liquefied via credit derivatives and actual and synthetic securitizations. The loan originating bank holds the remaining illiquid tranche containing the concentrated credit risk, private information rent and the “excess spread” that incentivize the bank to continue to monitor and service the loans. Empirically, we find that the average size of the residual tranche is about 3%, which reflects the size of the “market determined capital” necessary to support the liquefaction. The liquefaction of bank loans makes possible a banking system that restricts the guaranteed accounts to be backed by 100% reserves and the non-guaranteed deposits to be backed by liquid securitized loan tranches, while retaining the deposit-lending synergy. Such a system is perfectly safe without deposit insurance and it renders banks bankruptcy-remote without sacrificing a bank’s traditional role as a financial intermediary.