This study extracts the common factors from firm-based credit spreads of major Japanese corporate bonds and examines the predictive content of the credit spread on the real economy. Instead of employing single-maturity corporate bond spreads, we focus on the entire term structure of the credit...

How does a firm choose a set of covenants and of collateral to pledge when issuing straight bonds publicly in Japan? Covenants and collaterals are contract clauses intended to protect rights of the bondholders. If the protection is priced in the issue, why do firms try to put them all in the...

This paper investigates the usefulness of the term structure of credit spreads to predict the business cycle in Japan. Our analyses provide clear evidence that the term structure of credit spreads has more predictive power than the government bond yield. Specifically, the paper shows that the...

This paper explores the dynamic relationship between stock market implied credit spreads, CDS spreads, and bond spreads. A general VECM representation is proposed for changes in the three credit spread measures which accounts for zero, one, or two independent cointegration equations, depending...