Valuation of Contingent Convertible Bonds

Sammanfattning: Contingent convertible bonds are hybrid capital instruments, contingent on some form of indicator of financial distress of the issuing bank. Following the financial crisis, these instruments are proposed as a solution to the moral hazard issue of banks too big to fail. With the increased capital requirements of the Basel III directive, contingent capital enables banks to increase their capitalization without issuing expensive equity. Also, in times of historically low interest rates, these instruments might be interesting for investors in search of higher yields, as well as long term investors wanting to implement countercyclical investment strategies. However, due to the high complexity of these instruments, valuation has proven diffcult. The purpose of this thesis is to value instruments contingent on the bank's common equity tier 1 to risk-weighted assets ratio. We build our model upon the work of Glasserman & Nouri (2012), and extend it to include contingency on risk-weighted assets, instant non-continuous conversion to equity, and a combination of fixed imposed loss and fixed conversion price as terms of conversion. We use a capital structure model in continuous time to define asset dynamics, asset claims and the event of conversion and liquidation of the bank. Thereafter we use two important results from Glasserman & Nouri (2012) to value the discounted cash flows to holders of debt and contingent debt. From this, we arrive at closed form solutions for the coupon rates of these securities.