We study the relation between leverage and corporate tax rates using an extensive data set constructed from all corporate income tax returns filed with the IRS from 1926 to 2009. This data set includes financial statement data from millions of private and public corporations of all sizes. We...

We model illiquidity as a restriction on the stopping rules investors can follow in selling assets, and apply this framework to the valuation of thinly-traded investments. We find that discounts for illiquidity can be surprisingly large, approaching 30 to 50 percent in some cases. Immediacy...

Using an extensive new data set on corporate bond defaults in the U.S. from 1866 to 2010, we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises. During the past 150 years, the U.S. has experienced many severe corporate default crises...

We study corporate bond default rates using an extensive new data set spanning the 1866-2008 period. We find that the corporate bond market has repeatedly suffered clustered default events much worse than those experienced during the Great Depression. For example, during the railroad crisis of...

We show that the price of a Treasury bond and an inflation-swapped TIPS issue exactly replicating the cash flows of the Treasury bond can differ by more than $20 per $100 notional. Treasury bonds are almost always overvalued relative to TIPS. Total TIPS-Treasury mispricing has exceeded $56...

We study the pricing of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) using an extensive new data set for the actively-traded CDX credit index and its tranches. We find that a three-factor portfolio credit model allowing for firm-specific, industry, and economywide default events explains virtually all...

We study the nature of sovereign credit risk using an extensive sample of CDS spreads for 26 developed and emerging-market countries. Sovereign credit spreads are surprisingly highly correlated, with just three principal components accounting for more than 50 percent of their variation....

This paper studies the market price of credit risk incorporated into one of the most important credit spreads in the financial markets: interest rate swap spreads. Our approach consists of jointly modeling the swap and Treasury term structures using a general five-factor affine credit framework...

There are many examples of markets where an agent who wants to get out of an investment position quickly may find himself trapped and forced to remain in that position because of a lack of liquidity. What are the asset-pricing implications when agents cannot always buy and sell assets...

Many firms have stockholders who face severe restrictions on their ability to sell their shares and diversify the risk of their personal wealth. We study the costs of these liquidity restrictions on stockholders using a continuous-time portfolio choice framework. These restrictions have major...