Although the equity premium is - both from a conceptual and empirical perspective - a widely researched topic in finance, there is still no consensus in the academic literature about its magnitude. In this paper, we propose a different estimation method which is based on credit valuations. The...

I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Governments balance benefits of default induced redistribution and costs due to income losses in the wake of a default. Their choice of short- versus long- term debt affects default and rollover decisions by...

We develop a sovereign debt model with offcial and private creditors where default risk depends on both the level and the composition of liabilities. Higher exposure to offcial lenders improves incentives to repay but carries extra costs, such as reduced ex-post flexibility. The model implies...

We shed light on the function, properties and optimal size of austerity using the standard sovereign debt model augmented to include incomplete information about credit risk. Austerity is defined as the shortfall of consumption from the level desired by a country and supported by its repayment...

The near-failure on September 16, 2008, of American International Group (AIG) was an iconic moment in the financial crisis. The decision to rescue AIG was controversial at the time and remains so. Large bets on real estate pushed AIG to the brink of bankruptcy. In one case, AIG used securities...

The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of implicit government guarantees of the obligations of government-sponsored enterprises. We construct a model with competitive housing and mortgage markets in which the government provides banks with insurance against aggregate shocks to mortgage...

We propose several connectedness measures built from pieces of variance decompositions, and we argue that they provide natural and insightful measures of connectedness among financial asset returns and volatilities. We also show that variance decompositions define weighted, directed networks, so...

We argue that China's rising shadow banking was inextricably linked to potential balancesheet risks in the banking system. We substantiate this argument with three didactic findings: (1) commercial banks in general were prone to engage in channeling risky entrusted loans; (2) shadow banking...