Setting the optimal make-whole call premium
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With a make-whole call, the call price is calculated as the maximum of the par value and the present value of the bond's remaining payments discounted at the prevailing risk-free rate plus a pre-specified spread known as the make-whole premium. The commonly accepted thumb rule in the investment banking community is to set the make-whole premium at 15% of the at-issue credit spread. Using a standard structural model, we calculate the optimal make-whole call premium, i.e. the make-whole premium that maximizes the ex-ante firm value subject to managers following a second-best call policy that maximizes the ex-post equity value. For reasonable parameterizations, optimal make-whole premiums are relatively close to 15% of the model-generated credit spread. Thus, the 15% thumb rule provides surprisingly good guidance for setting make-whole call premiums.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it