We develop a methodology to study the linkages between equity and corporate bond risk premia and apply it to a large panel of corporate bond transaction data. We and that a significant part of the time variation in bond default risk premia can be explained by equity implied bond risk premium...

At any point in time, most firms are not in financial distress. This implies that they must suffer value losses unrelated to their leverage before becoming financially distressed. We first show that if estimates of ex-ante distress costs are not filtered of such non-debt related value declines,...

We propose an explanation for default contagion based on a Lucas model with two independent debt-financed trees. The transmission mechanism is that variations in the size of one tree impact the level of risk premium and the default decision for all borrowers. If a negative shock hits one tree,...