Pricing Municipal Investment Bonds with Implicit Government Guarantees: A Fractional Jump–Diffusion Approach
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62517/jse.202511618
Author(s)
Yan Zhang, Yixiang Tian, Lin Chen*
Affiliation(s)
School of Economics and Management, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
* Corresponding Author
Abstract
Over the past decade, local administration financing vehicles (LGFVs) in China have issued a large volume of municipal investment bonds to support infrastructure development and urban expansion. Despite their economic relevance, the credit risk of these bonds is largely shaped by implicit government guarantees, which substantially complicates risk assessment and valuation. Motivated by the presence of strategy persistence in administration asset management and the non-market-driven shocks affecting state-owned enterprise asset values, this paper models state-owned enterprise asset values dynamics using a fractional Brownian motion to capture long-range dependence and a jump–diffusion process to account for abrupt structural interventions. Within a structural credit risk framework, we develop a valuation model for municipal investment bonds that explicitly incorporates an implicit guarantee intensity parameter, and employ the fast Fourier transform (FFT) to obtain efficient numerical solutions. The results indicate that bond prices are positively related to the strength of implicit administration guarantees, yet the relationship is highly nonlinear. When the implicit guarantee intensity is relatively low, bond prices exhibit limited sensitivity to changes in guarantees; however, once the implicit guarantee intensity exceeds a critical threshold, price sensitivity increases markedly. These findings provide a new modeling perspective for pricing corporate bonds with implicit administration backing and contribute to the broader literature on credit risk under state intervention.
Keywords
Municipal Investment Bonds; Implicit Administration Guarantees; Fractional Brownian Motion; Jump–Diffusion Model; Fast Fourier Transform
References
[1]Schich, S. and Lindh, S. (2012) ‘Implicit guarantees for bank debt: where do we stand?’, Financial Market Trends, 10, pp. 45–63.
[2]Zhao, L. (2018) ‘Market-based estimates of implicit government guarantees in European financial institutions’, European Financial Management, 24(1), pp. 79–112.
[3]Irwin, G. and Vines, D. (2003) ‘Government guarantees, investment, and vulnerability to financial crises’, Review of International Economics, 11(5), pp. 860–874.
[4]Hahn, S., Momtaz, P.P. and Wieandt, A. (2023) ‘The economics of banking regulation in Europe: does the post-GFC bail-in regime effectively eliminate implicit government guarantees?’, European Journal of Finance, 29(7), pp. 700–725.
[5]Zhang, K. (2023) ‘Government’s implicit guarantee and the credit spread of the quasi-municipal investment bonds’, Finance Research Letters, 55, p. 103861.
[6]Zhang, R., Li, Y.F. and Tian, Y. (2022) ‘Corporate bonds with implicit government guarantees’, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 71, p. 101697.
[7]Dong, Y.S., Dong, Y. and Xuan, W.S. (2023) ‘Implicit government guarantees, media tone and bond pricing’, Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, 00, pp. 1–40.
[8]Dong, Y., Hou, Q.N. and Ni, C.K. (2021) ‘Implicit government guarantees and credit ratings’, Journal of Corporate Finance, 69, p. 102046.
[9]Zhang, X.Q. and Wang, Z.W. (2023) ‘Implicit government guarantee and corporate investment: evidence from China’s Belt and Road Initiative’, Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, 59(2), pp. 528–541.
[10]Jin, S., Wang, W. and Zhang, Z.L. (2023) ‘The real effects of implicit government guarantee: evidence from Chinese state-owned enterprise defaults’, Management Science, 69(6), pp. 3650–3674.
[11]Black, F. and Scholes, M. (1973) ‘The pricing of options and corporate liabilities’, Journal of Political Economy, 81(3), pp. 637–654.
[12]Merton, R.C. (1976) ‘Option pricing when underlying stock returns are discontinuous’, Journal of Financial Economics, 3(1–2), pp. 125–144.
[13]Kou, S.G. (2002) ‘A jump-diffusion model for option pricing’, Management Science, 48(8), pp. 1086–1101.
[14]Ramezani, C.A. and Zeng, Y. (2007) ‘Maximum likelihood estimation of asymmetric jump-diffusion processes: application to financial asset prices’, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 31(9), pp. 2852–2879.
[15]Mandelbrot, B.B. and Van Ness, J.W. (1968) ‘Fractional Brownian motions, fractional noises and applications’, SIAM Review, 10(4), pp. 422–437.
[16]Cartea, Á. and del Castillo-Negrete, D. (2007) ‘Fractional diffusion models of option prices in markets with jumps’, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 374(2), pp. 749–763.
[17]Hainaut, D. and Leonenko, N. (2021) ‘Option pricing in illiquid markets: a fractional jump–diffusion approach’, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 381, p. 112995.
[18]Park, Y.-H. (2016) ‘The effects of asymmetric volatility and jumps on the pricing of VIX derivatives’, Journal of Econometrics, 192, pp. 313–328.
[19]Rostek, S. (2012) ‘Explaining the volatility surface: a closed-form solution to option pricing in a fractional jump-diffusion market’, Paris December 2012 Finance Meeting EUROFIDAI-AFFI Paper.
[20]Carr, P. and Madan, D.B. (1999) ‘Option valuation using the fast Fourier transform’, Journal of Computational Finance, 2(4), pp. 61–73.
[21]Huang, J., Zhu, W. and Ruan, X. (2014) ‘Option pricing using the fast Fourier transform under the double exponential jump model with stochastic volatility and stochastic intensity’, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 263, pp. 152–159.