Fragility that periodically erupts into a full-blown financial crisis appears to be an integral feature of market-based financial systems in spite of the emergence of sophisticated risk management tools and regulatory systems. If anything, the increased frequency of modern crises underscores how...

We analyse the links between credit default swap (CDS) and bond spreads and try to determine which one is the leading market in the price discovery process. To do that, we construct a sample of CDS premia and bonds spreads on a generic 5-year bond, for 17 financials and 18 sovereigns. First, we...

We examine the role of bank leverage to explain why the 2007-08 financial crisis unfolded at a time when the economy appears to be less fragile to crisis risks. To this end, we extend the model introduced by Diamond and Rajan (2012) to a variant where the probability of financial crises varies...