In an equilibrium Black and Scholes (1973) economy, a firm's default risk and its expected equity return are non-monotonically related. This may explain the surprising relation found between these two variables in recent empirical research. Although changes in default risk induced by expected...

We study the asset pricing implications of being able to optimally early exercise a plain-vanilla put option, contrasting the expected returns of equivalent American and European put options. Standard pricing models with stochastic volatility and asset-value jumps suggest the expected return...