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In this paper, we consider a market with a term structure of credit risky bonds in the single-name case. We aim at minimal assumptions extending existing results in this direction: first, the random field of forward rates is driven by a general semimartingale. Second, the Heath–Jarrow–Morton (HJM) approach is extended with an additional component capturing those future jumps in the term structure which are visible from the current time. Third, the associated recovery scheme is as general as possible, it is only assumed to be nonincreasing. In this general setting, we derive generalized drift conditions which characterize when a given measure is a local martingale measure, thus yielding no asymptotic free lunch with vanishing risk (NAFLVR), the right notion for this large financial market to be free of arbitrage.

In this paper, we study time-inhomogeneous affine processes beyond the common assumption of stochastic continuity. In this setting, times of jumps can be both inaccessible and predictable. To this end, we develop a general theory of finite dimensional affine semimartingales under very weak assumptions. We show that the corresponding semimartingale characteristics have affine form and that the conditional characteristic function can be represented with solutions to measure differential equations of Riccati type. We prove existence of affine Markov processes and affine semimartingales under mild conditions and elaborate on examples and applications including affine processes in discrete time.

Based on the theory of multivariate time changes for Markov processes, we show how to identify affine processes as solutions of certain time change equations. The result is a strong version of a theorem presented by J. Kallsen (2006) which provides a representation in law of an affine process as a time-change transformation of a family of independent L\'evy processes., Comment: 26 pages