In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, much attention has been paid to investigating the appropriateness of the current practice of default risk modeling in banking, finance and insurance industries. A recent empirical study by Guo et al. (Rev Deriv Res 11(3): 171–204, 2008) shows that the time difference between the economic and recorded default dates has a significant impact on recovery rate estimates. Guo et al. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.0843, 2011) develop a theoretical structural firm asset value model for a firm default process that embeds the distinction of these two default times. In this paper, we assume the market participants cannot observe the firm asset value directly and we develop reduced-form models for characterizing the economic and recorded default times. We derive the probability distributions of these two default times. Numerical experiments with empirical data are given to demonstrate the proposed models. Our approach helps researchers to gain a new perspective for economic and recorded defaults and is more feasible in general practice compared with current method. Our results can also contribute to the understanding of the impacts of various parameters on the economic and recorded default times.