The main objective of Credit Risk: Modeling, Valuation and Hedging is to present a comprehensive survey of the past developments in the area of credit risk research, as well as to put forth the most recent advancements in this field. An important aspect of this text is that it attempts to bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of credit risk and the financial practice, which serves as the motivation for the mathematical modeling studied in the book. Mathematical developments are presented in a thorough manner and cover the structural (value-of-the-firm) and the reduced (intensity-based) approaches to credit risk modeling, applied both to single and to multiple defaults. In particular, the book offers a detailed study of various arbitrage-free models of defaultable term structures with several rating grades.
This volume will serve as a valuable reference for financial analysts and traders involved with credit derivatives. Some aspects of the book may also be useful for market practitioners engaged in managing credit-risk sensitive portfolios. Graduate students and researchers in areas such as finance theory, mathematical finance, financial engineering and probability theory will benefit from the book as well.
On the technical side, readers are assumed to be familiar with graduate level probability theory, theory of stochastic processes, and elements of stochastic analysis and PDEs; some aquaintance with arbitrage pricing theory is also expected. A systematic exposition of mathematical techniques underlying the intensity-based approach is however provided.

Mathematical finance and financial engineering have been rapidly expanding fields of science over the past three decades. The main reason behind this phenomenon has been the success of sophisticated quantitative methodolo­ gies in helping professionals manage financial risks. It is expected that the newly developed credit derivatives industry will also benefit from the use of advanced mathematics. This industry has grown around the need to handle credit risk, which is one of the fundamental factors of financial risk. In recent years, we have witnessed a tremendous acceleration in research efforts aimed at better comprehending, modeling and hedging this kind of risk. Although in the first chapter we provide a brief overview of issues related to credit risk, our goal was to introduce the basic concepts and related no­ tation, rather than to describe the financial and economical aspects of this important sector of financial market. The interested reader may consult, for instance, Francis et al. (1999) or Nelken (1999) for a much more exhaustive description of the credit derivatives industry.