This article studies the economic factors behind corporate default risk premia in Europe during the period 2006–2010. We employ information embedded in Credit Default Swap (CDS) contracts to quantify expected excess returns from the underlying bonds in market-wide default circumstances. We...

This study analyses how liquidity risk affects bonds' yield spreads after controlling for credit risk, bond-specific characteristics and macroeconomic variables. Using two liquidity estimates, LOT liquidity and the bid-ask spread, we find that, in particular, the LOT liquidity measure has...

This study analyses how liquidity risk affects bonds' yield spreads after controlling for credit risk, bond-specific characteristics and macroeconomic variables. Using two liquidity estimates, LOT liquidity and the bid-ask spread, we find that, in particular, the LOT liquidity measure has...

This paper attempts to find an aggregate leading indicator to predict the spreads observed for high-yield (HY) bond indices. Using a vector error correction (VEC) specification for quarterly data, we establish a long-term equilibrium relationship between the HY market spreads and its...

I demonstrate that much of the time series variation in the credit spread on high yield bonds is attributable to changes in the “credit risk premium” rather than changes in expected default losses. The credit risk premium is the expected excess return investors earn from bearing default risk...

This paper investigates the holding period risk premia of U.S. corporate and Treasury bonds. Using excess return regressions, two priced risk factors are derived from yield and macroeconomic data: a priced term risk factor and a priced credit risk factor explain half of the variation in one-year...

This paper attempts to find an aggregate leading indicator to predict the spreads observed for high-yield (HY) bond indices. Using a vector error correction (VEC) specification for quarterly data, we establish a long-term equilibrium relationship between the HY market spreads and its...

We derive expected bond return equations for various structural credit valuation models with alternative stochastic processes and boundary conditions for default given in Merton [1974], Merton [1976], Black and Cox [1976], Heston [1993], Longstaff and Schwartz [1995], and Collin-Dufresne and...

We propose a news-implied rare disaster risk indicator and study its predictive power on the returns of U.S. Treasury bonds. We find that the predictive power of this factor is both statistically significant and economically important and is not spanned by the current yield curve. The disaster...

In contrast to earlier decades, since the early 2000s, the average idiosyncratic volatility of stocks has fallen back to its pre-1990s level. Here, we examine whether decreasing volatility still helps to explain the cross-sectional variation of bond returns. Using a panel data of corporate bond...