TY - JOUR T1 - Stripping Coupons with Linear Programming JF - The Journal of Fixed Income SP - 80 LP - 87 DO - 10.3905/jfi.2000.319271 VL - 10 IS - 2 AU - David E. Allen AU - Lyn C. Thomas AU - Harry Zheng Y1 - 2000/09/30 UR - https://pm-research.com/content/10/2/80.abstract N2 - When using market prices to fit the parameters of models for the price of bonds, the first step is to strip the market bonds of their coupons. The standard bootstrapping technique of stripping coupons can cause mispricing if there are no bonds that mature for some periods or if there are several bonds that mature at the same time. In this article we suggest a new linear programming formulation to strip out riskfree and risky zero coupon bond prices, which works whatever the current date, coupon dates, and sampling dates. The stripped U.S. Treasury bond prices match the observed U.S. STRIPS prices. We also discuss issues of liquidity, sampling periods, and implied default probabilities of corporate bonds. ER -