The part of credit spread that is not explained by corporate credit risk forecasts future economic activity. I show that the link with aggregate business risk and bond liquidity risk explains this fi nding. Once I project spreads on these two risk factors, which are readily measurable with the...

Market design matters when heterogeneous borrowers roll over loans, facing funding shocks. Borrower anonymity is a key feature of various financial markets, such as short term, interbank lending markets. We show that anonymous markets experience systemic runs for large shocks, but provide...

We introduce a class of quantile-based risk measures that generalize Value at Risk (VaR) and, likewise Expected Shortfall (ES), take into account both the frequency and the severity of losses. Under VaR a single confidence level is assigned regardless of the size of potential losses. We allow...

The effective functioning of the municipal bond market is crucial for the provision of public services, as it is the largest capital market for state and municipal issuers. Prior research has documented tax, credit, liquidity, and segmentation effects in municipal bonds. Recent regulatory...

We identify the origin of the contradicting perspectives on credit creation offered by Austrian, Mainstream and Post Keynesian economists as the neglect of the primacy of such assets as goods, properties and securities, which always pre-exist any transaction and loan. We develop a unified...

This paper develops a structural equilibrium model with intertemporal macroeconomic risk, incorporating the fact that firms are heterogeneous in their asset composition. Compared to firms that are mainly composed of invested assets, firms with growth options have higher costs of debt because...

The recursive prediction and filtering formulas of the Kalman filter are difficult to implement in nonlinear state space models. For Gaussian linear state space models, or for models with qualitative state variables, the recursive formulas of the filter require the updating of a finite number of...

We analyze portfolio credit risk in light of dynamic quot;frailty,quot; by which the credit qualities of different firms depend on common unobservable time-varying default covariates. Frailty is estimated to have a large impact on estimated conditional mean default rates, above and beyond those...

Ending the dependence on rating agencies is a top priority for the Financial Stability Board, which coordinates the G20 financial policies. Rating agencies have been accused of contributing to the recent financial crisis by misjudging the creditworthiness of mortgage-backed securities. Their...

We test if issuers of asset- and mortgage-backed securities receive rating favors from agencies with which they maintain strong business relationships. Controlling for issuer fixed effects and a large set of credit risk determinants, we show that agencies publish better ratings for those issuers...