We construct credit risk indicators for euro area banks and non-financial corporations. These are the average spreads on the yield of euro area private sector bonds relative to the yield on German federal government securities of matched maturities. The indicators are also constructed at the...

This paper explores the effect of equity volatility on corporate bond yields. Panel data for the late 1990's show that idiosyncratic firm-level volatility can explain as much cross-sectional variation in yields as can credit ratings. This finding, together with the upward trend in idiosyncratic...

We use yield spreads to construct ex-ante returns on corporate securities, and then use the ex-ante returns in asset pricing assets. Differently from the standard approach, our tests do not use ex-post average returns as a proxy for expected returns. We find that the market beta plays a much...

We develop a structural credit risk model to examine how the interactions of liquidity and default risk affect corporate bond pricing. By explicitly modeling debt rollover and by endogenizing the holding costs via collateralized financing, our model generates rich links between liquidity risk...

We quantify the importance of non-monetary news in central bank communication. Using evidence from four major central banks and a comprehensive classification of events, we decompose news conveyed by central banks into news about monetary policy, economic growth, and separately, shocks to risk...

This paper is an investigation into the determinants of asymmetries in stock returns. We develop a series of cross-sectional regression specifications which attempt to forecast skewness in the daily returns of individual stocks. Negative skewness is most pronounced in stocks that have...

The aggregate dividend payout ratio forecasts aggregate excess returns on both stocks and corporate bonds in post-war US data. Both high corporate profits and high stock prices forecast low excess returns on equities. When the payout ratio is high, expected returns are high. The payout ratio's...

We construct portfolios of stocks and of bonds that are maximally predictable with respect to a set of ex ante observable economic variables, and show that these levels of predictability are statistically significant, even after controlling for data-snooping biases. We disaggregate the sources...

The predictability of monthly stock returns is investigated from the perspective of a risk-averse investor who uses the data to update initially vague beliefs about the conditional distribution of returns. The optimal stocks-versus-cash allocation of the investor can depend importantly on the...