Pricing anomaly at the first sight: same borrower in different currencies faces different credit spreads—an explanation by means of a quanto option

Abstract

Can the credit spreads of one and the same issuer differ in two different currencies? If so, can an investor exploit this situation? To answer these questions and to contribute to the existing literature, we extend the Jarrow/Turnbull-model with a second currency, price a quanto option, and test the theoretical results with an extensive empirical study. A major result of the study was the key insight that the credit spreads, and therefore the cumulated implied default probabilities of nearly all bonds denominated in USD in comparison to EUR denominated bonds, are significantly higher for all terms, and are mostly driven by the correlation between default risk and exchange rate.