Previous papers that test whether sentiment is useful for predicting volatility ignore whether lagged returns information might also be useful for this purpose. By doing so, these papers potentially overestimate the role of sentiment in predicting volatility. In this paper we test whether...

We investigate why spreads on corporate bonds are so much larger than expected losses from default. Systematic factors make very little contribution to spreads, even if higher moments or downside effects are taken into account. Instead we find that sizes of spreads are strongly related to...