Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-martingales-and-financial-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2009/b/4/a/solution

Apply Itô's formula to for positive initial value . The drift correction is , so
This is geometric Brownian motion. Under the physical probability measure, has the standard normal distribution. For positive volatility,
The drift here is , because this is a physical bankruptcy probability. The risk-neutral measure will instead give drift for pricing. If , the value is deterministic and the default probability is the indicator of ; the usual positive-volatility convention is used in the remaining formulas.

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