Cbonds Pages: NUS Credit Research Initiative

The Credit Research Initiative (CRI) is a non-profit undertaking by the Risk Management Institute at NUS, and seeks to promote research and development in the critical area of credit risk. The foundation of the CRI is the probability of default (PD) model which has been developed using a database of over 60,000 listed firms in Asia-Pacific, North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. The outputs of RMI's PD model are avilable on http://www.rmicri.org/, including daily updated PDs for individual firms in the aforementioned regions and aggregate PDs for different economies and sectors. The RMI family of Corporate Vulnerability Indices (RMI CVI) are derived from firm-specific RMI PDs.

This non-profit initiative was conceptualized by Professor Jin-Chuan Duan in March 2009. It takes a "public good" approach to credit rating with the goal of keeping the PD model current, evolutionary and organic, and functions like a "selective Wikipedia." RMI announced the CRI in July 2009 and started releasing results from its PD model in July 2010 at its fourth Annual Risk Management Conference.