We want to assess the relationship between the equity and the debt cost of capital. Using a very simple dividend discount model we compute the implied discount rate and we compare it with the corresponding premium on the corporate credit default swap using a cointegration approach. We...

We examine the effects on a financial network of clearing all contracts though a central node (CN) thereby transforming the original network into a star-shaped one. The CN is capitalized with external equity and a guaranty fund. We introduce a structural systemic risk measure that captures the...

Do credit ratings help enforce market discipline on banks? Analyzing a uniquely comprehensive dataset consisting of 1,081 rating change announcements for 154 international financial institutions between January 2004 and December 2015, we find that rating downgrades for internal reasons, such as...

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...

We introduce a novel class of credit risk models in which the drift of the survival process of a firm is a linear function of the factors. The prices of defaultable bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) are linear-rational in the factors. The price of a CDS option can be uniformly approximated by...

We show that liquidity risk is priced in the cross section of returns on credit default swaps (CDSs). We measure CDS market illiquidity by aggregating deviations of credit index levels from their no-arbitrage values implied by the index constituents' CDS spreads, and we construct a tradable...

This paper empirically analyses the effect of foreign block acquisitions on the U.S. target firms' credit risk as captured by their CDS. The involvement of foreign investors leads to a significant increase in the target firms' CDS spreads. This effect is stronger when foreign owners are...