Based on archival and survey data we show that the maturity of U.S. business loans has been continuously increasing since the mid-1930s when banks invented the term loan. Concurrently, bank innovation first involved the invention of credit analysis and covenant design. Later, bank innovation...

This paper applies both conventional panel data models and a dynamic simultaneous equations model to analyze the impact of fiscal austerity and growth prospects along with other macro fundamentals on the pricing of sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) for a panel of 36 countries including the...

We consider whether government bonds, through the term structure, or corporate bonds, through the default yield, provide predictive power for output, consumption and investment growth. Such predictive power will allow policy-makers to use the information as a leading indicator for macroeconomic...