The market for high yield (below investment-grade) corporate bonds developed in the middle 1980s. We show that, since this time, the high yield spread has had significant explanatory power for the business cycle. We interpret this finding as possibly symptomatic of financial factors at work in...

It is often suggested that the slope of the term structure of interest rates contains information about the expected future path of inflation. Mishkin (1990) has recently shown that the spread between the 12-month and 3-month interest rates helps to predict the difference between the 12-month...