While the relationship between volatility and risk is central to much of thefinancial literature it has not been incorporated systematically into assessment ofsovereign debt sustainability. This paper attempts to fill this gap by studying how the probability distribution of sovereign debt to GDP...

While empirical evidence nds only a weak relationship between nominal exchangerates and macroeconomic fundamentals, forex markets participants often attribute ex-change rate movements to a macroeconomic variable. The variables that matter, how-ever, appear to change over time and some variable...

We establish an empirical link between the ex-ante uncertainty about macroeconomic fundamentals and the ex-post resolution of this uncertainty in financial markets. We measure macroeconomic uncertainty using prices of economic derivatives and relate this measure to changes in implied...

This paper develops a quantitative framework for analyzing the impact of macroeconomic conditions on credit risk and dynamic capital structure choice. We begin by observing that when cash flows depend on current economic conditions, there will be a benefit for firms to adapt their default and...

This paper is a revised version of an Economic History thesis submitted to the London School of Economics in September 2000.The main text assumes analytical rather than chronological form, and, to avoid breaking the flow of the argument, it refers to persons, Labour Party structures and...

This paper extends the approach of measuring and stress-testing the systemic risk of a banking sector in Huang, Zhou, and Zhu (2009) to identifying various sources of financial instability and to allocating systemic risk to individual financial institutions. The systemic risk measure, defined as...

How do ratings fit in?, Financial crisis Issues, Financial Crisis Impact

We analyze the quality of macroeconomic survey forecasts. Recent findings indicate that theyare anchoring biased. This irrationality would challenge the results of a wide range ofempirical studies, e.g., in asset pricing, volatility clustering or market liquidity, which rely onsurvey data to...

We study the impact of the arrival of macroeconomic news on the informational andnoise-driven components in high-frequency quote processes and their conditional variances.Bid and ask returns are decomposed into a common ("ecient return") factorand two market-side-specic components capturing...