Pricing model of interest rate swap with a bilateral default risk

Under the foundation of Duffle & Huang (1996)[7], this paper integrates the reduced form model and the structure model for a default risk measure, giving rise to a new pricing model of interest rate swap with a bilateral default risk. This model avoids the shortcomings of ignoring the dynamic movements of the firm's assets of the reduced form model but adds only a little complexity and simplifies the pricing formula significantly when compared with Li (1998)[10]. With the help of the Crank-Nicholson difference method, we give the numerical solutions of the new model to study the default risk effects on the swap rate. We find that for a one year interest rate swap with the coupon paid per quarter, the variance of the default fixed rate payer decreases from 0.1 to 0.01 only causing about a 1.35%'s increase in the swap rate. This is consistent with previous results. (C), 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.