We find that firm-level variance risk premium, estimated as the difference between option-implied and expected variances, has a prominent explanatory power for credit spreads in the presence of market- and firm-level risk control variables identified in the existing literature. Such a...

We develop two novel approaches to solving for the Laplace transform of a time-changed stochastic process. We discard the standard assumption that the background process (X_t) is Levy. Maintaining the assumption that the business clock (T_t) and the background process are independent, we develop...

We investigate how market participants price and manage counterparty risk in the post-crisis period using confidential trade repository data on single-name credit default swap (CDS) transactions. We find that counterparty risk has a modest impact on the pricing of CDS contracts, but a large...

We use non-Gaussian features in U.S. macroeconomic data to identify aggregate supply and demand shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. Recessions in the 1970s and 1980s were driven primarily by supply shocks, later recessions were driven primarily by demand shocks, and the Great...

To study whether banks retain their lessons from the experience of a severe financial crisis, we examine the effects of the systemic banking crisis of the early 1990s in three Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, and Sweden). While this crisis largely bypassed the rest of Europe, we hypothesize...

Building on the work of Sorge and Virolainen (2006), we revisit the data on aggregate Finnish bank loan losses from the corporate sector, which covers the ‘Big Five' crisis in Finland in the early 1990s. Several extensions to the empirical model are considered. These extensions are then used...

Using the maximum entropy method, this paper estimates the danger of contagion in the Finnish interbank market in 2005–2007 as well as the existence of contagion during a Finnish banking crisis. The contagion analysis of the early 1990s is able to predict the most troublesome and defaulting...

The trend deviation of the Credit-to-GDP ratio (“Basel gap”) is a widely used early warning indicator of banking crises. It is calculated with the one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter using an extremely large value of the smoothing parameter λ. We recalibrate the smoothing parameter with panel...

This paper investigates leading indicators of systemic banking crises in a panel of 11 EU countries, with a particular focus on Finland. We use quarterly data from 1980Q1 to 2013Q2, in order to create a large number of macro-financial indicators, as well as their various transformations. We make...

Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) are frequently thought of as risk-free real bonds. Using no-arbitrage term structure models, we show that TIPS yields exceeded risk-free real yields by as much as 100 basis points when TIPS were first issued and up to 300 basis points during the...