During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

Using an aggregate credit spread index, we find that it has substantial predictive power for corporate bond returns over short and long horizons. The return predictability is economically and statistically significant and robust to various controls. The credit spread index and its components...

We embed a structural model of credit risk inside a dynamic continuous-time consumption-based asset pricing model, which allows us to price equity and corporate debt in a unified framework. Our key economic assumptions are that the first and second moments of earnings and consumption growth...

This paper examines the relation between industry competition, credit spreads, and levered equity returns. I build a quantitative model where firms make investment, financing, and default decisions subject to aggregate and idiosyncratic risk. Firms operate in heterogeneous industries that differ...

We derive expected bond return equations for various structural credit valuation models with alternative stochastic processes and boundary conditions for default given in Merton [1974], Merton [1976], Black and Cox [1976], Heston [1993], Longstaff and Schwartz [1995], and Collin-Dufresne and...

We propose a news-implied rare disaster risk indicator and study its predictive power on the returns of U.S. Treasury bonds. We find that the predictive power of this factor is both statistically significant and economically important and is not spanned by the current yield curve. The disaster...

Using implied-CDS risk premium measures, we find that these variables have higher explanatory power for cross-sectional bond returns than the traditional default spread and ratings. The positive effect of the credit risk premium (CRP) factor on expected returns is pervasive, stronger for...

We document that the first and third cross-sectional moments of corporate bond returns significantly and positively predict future stock market returns both in- and out-of-sample. The predictability emerges from informed bond trading and gradual diffusion of information. Particularly, the...

We examine whether the predictability and business-cycle dependence of excess returns in US Treasuries can be more naturally explained in terms of state-dependent risk premia or a specific cognitive bias (representativeness). We show that the extremely parsimonious cognitive-bias model in...

We study investor expectations of stock returns on the S&P 500 index using data from the Livingston survey over the 1952-2019 period. We find that investors have slow-moving and countercyclical expected stock returns consistent with consumption-based model predictions. We find no evidence that...