From the introduction: Motor vehicle accidents are still a leading cause of death, even if the trend has somewhat declined over the past 20 years. Indeed, motor vehicle accidents are a significant cause of death in comparison with air and space transport accidents, homicides and even HIV...

Empirical studies on credit spread determinants are predicated on the presence of a single-regime over the entire sample period and thus find limited explanatory power. We show that a single regime model hides the fact that the explanatory variables take on different loadings across changing...