Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2016 iii Paper 211 1 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
First work with the filtration , which records the Brownian motion and whether default has occurred. On all subsequent defaultable stock prices vanish. On , the memoryless property of the exponential distribution gives survival from to with conditional probability . The residual survival event is independent of the future independent increments of the Brownian motion. Thus, for deterministic ,Also , so this is a true martingale, with no localization needed. Its natural filtration is contained in ; applying the tower property of conditional expectation to the displayed identity yields the requested natural-filtration martingale property:The printed convention keeps the stock alive at . It is a left-continuous convention at that one random time. Replacing it by gives the usual càdlàg zero-recovery default model; since at each fixed , the fixed-time martingale calculations above are unchanged.