We develop intuitive expressions for the spread between a forwardcontract and a similar futures contract taking into account the pos-sibility of counterparty default. We evaluate these expressions nu-merically and show that the forward-futures spread is significant forrealistic parameter...

Most derivative contracts are traded over-the-counter, i.e., bilaterally between two counterparties. Recently, clearing services have become available that allow to transfer over-the-counter derivatives to a central counterparty (clearing house). We develop a framework to determine the effects...

We construct an empirical measure of market frictions in the corporate market based on the difference between the corporate bond spread and the credit default swap spread for a large number of firms in a new, large dataset that we construct. Under fairly standard assumptions, the two spreads...