We propose a method to extract individual firms' risk-neutral return distributions by combining options and credit default swaps (CDS). Options provide information about the central part of the distribution, and CDS anchor the left tail. Jointly, options and CDS span the intermediate part of the...

This study estimates the term structure of risk premia before and during the 2007/2008 fi nancial crisis using a new approach based on credit default swaps. Credit markets off er the unique possibility to estimate risk premia for distinct maturities, which considerably facilitates the estimation...

In almost every financial market crisis we can observe widening credit spreads, especially in the last years during the subprime and sovereign debt crisis. But what exactly drives the credit spread? This paper will outline static components, i.e. default risk, liquidity, risk and the relative...

This paper proposes a risk-based explanation of the negative relation between credit spreads and expected equity returns found in the data. In a model where issuing equity is costly and debt has a tax advantage, firms optimally choose a lower net leverage if their cash flows are more correlated...

This paper quantifies the premium demanded by the investors for bearing the corporate default risk. We propose a novel approach that exploits the information in both credit default swap (CDS) spreads and stock prices, using the pricing restrictions provided by a structural model of credit risk....

In this work we incorporate recovery risk into Merton's original credit risk model by introducing a separate risk driver for the recovery process and rationalize this new model within a "partial information" perspective. We show that while adding the recovery risk driver has no impact on...

Spreads of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) vary significantly in the cross section and over time, but the sources of this variation are not well understood. We document that, in the cross section, MBS spreads adjusted for the prepayment option show a pronounced smile with respect to the...

De- and re-levering betas is important to obtain discount rates for assets that are not publicly traded. A de- and re-levering procedure is around for the case of risk-free debt. The procedure for risky debt is much less clear even under very simplifying assumptions. In this paper, I concretize...