We study the potential model instability problem with respect to mortgage default risk and examine to what extent it helps explain the default shock during the recent crisis. We find that econometric default risk models based on historical data can be unstable over time. Due to temporal shifts...

In this paper we empirically study interactions between real activity and the financial stance. Using aggregate data we examine a number of candidate measures of the financial stance of the economy. We find strong evidence for substantial spillover effects on aggregate activity from our...

This paper defines economic slumps as sequences of structural breaks exhibiting a specific pattern. We identify 58 such episodes between 1950 and 2008 among 138 countries, and then examine the phases of decline and their duration. In some countries declines last extremely long, and we put...

This paper measures the economy-wide impact of bank distress on the loss of relationship benefits. We use the near-collapse of the Norwegian banking system during the period 1988 to 1991 to measure the impact of bank distress announcements on the stock prices of firms maintaining a relationship...

Following the 2001 financial crisis, the government of Argentina instituted economic policies to soften the adverse impact of the crisis on the economy. In this paper, we use loan-level data to empirically assess the impact of the currency devaluation and the economic response policies on...

This paper studies the effects of systematic distress and sectoral distress in the context of default/bankruptcy prediction using a large sample of U.S. public company default data from 1991 to 2009. I construct measures to proxy for economy-wide systematic distress and sectoral distress based...