The Lucas (1978) Tree Model lies at the heart of modern macro-finance. At its core, it provides an analysis of the equilibrium price of a long-lived asset in an exchange economy where consumption is the objective, and the sole purpose of the asset is to smooth consumption through time....

Credit spreads are the yields of risky debt securities minus risk-free rates. The finance literature has long argued which share of them is due to credit risk and which share results from other factors. We suggest a novel set of multiple quasi-natural experiments based on government guarantees...