This paper examines the relationship between sovereign bond spreads, local economic activity, and global financial risk. We use secondary-market prices of dollar-denominated sovereign securities to construct yield spreads between sovereign bond yields and yields on the appropriately defined...

To identify disruptions in credit markets, research on the role of asset prices in economic fluctuations has focused on the information content of various corporate credit spreads. We re-examine this evidence using a broad array of credit spreads constructed directly from the secondayr bond...

The canonical framework used to price risky debt implies that the payoff structure of levered equity resembles the payoff of a call option, while the bondholders face a payoff structure that is equivalent to that of an investor writing a put option. As a result, an increase in the payoff...

We develop an accounting methodology to map observed differences in borrowing costs into measures of aggregate resource misallocation that may plausibly be attributed to financial market imperfections. Using a log-normal approximation we show that this resource misallocation may be inferred from...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of financial conditions on price-setting behavior during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Using confidential, individual producer prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we match these prices to Compustat firm-level data and compare pricing behavior...

There is a consensus about the increasing exposure to disruptions in the financial system and economic uncertainty over the recent years. Despite their different implications for policy, discriminating empirically between these two sources of economic fluctuations is not an easy task because...

Using confidential product-level price data underlying the U.S. Producer Price Index (PPI), this paper analyzes the effect of changes in firms' financial conditions on their price-setting behavior during the "Great Recession" that surrounds the financial crisis. The evidence indicates that...

This paper introduces profitability uncertainty into an infinite-horizon variation of the classic Holmstrom and Milgrom (1987) model, and studies optimal dynamic contracting with endogenous learning. The agent's potential belief manipulation leads to the hidden information problem, which makes...

A variable rate demand obligation (VRDO) is a tax-emept municipal bond whose interest rate resets on a periodic basis. In addition, its bondholders have a "tender" option to liquidate their positions at par, exposing the issuer to possible runs. The VRDO market experienced large-scale runs in...

determination of the …nancing cost of working capital.