Much has been written in the press about the current global credit crisis and the consequences on the real economy. We want to take a step back and take stock of what we think should be the lessons learnt from an investment practicioner's point of view in order to avoid repeating the same...

We use a unique dataset of bond downgrades from a niche rating company that has been found to be reacting faster to publicly available information than its competitors. Using regime-switching models we propose risk measures to quantify stock return disturbances (distress costs) associated with...