We examine how equity-market frictions that restrict pessimistic trading, such as short-sale constraints, affect assessments of default risk. We find that these frictions decrease the usefulness of equity-market variables for identifying defaulting firms but increase their usefulness for...

We find a significant positive relation between changes in policy uncertainty and changes in credit spreads. Macroeconomic conditions, including general uncertainty, do not explain this result, which also holds when we use instrumental variables to address endogeneity issues. Policy uncertainty...

This paper studies sovereign debt pricing in the presence of corporate debt. We find that foreign currency (FC) corporate external debt empirically explains sovereign credit spreads in emerging countries, even after controlling for sovereign debt and global factors. Decomposing sovereign credit...

In this paper we utilise the risk factors from both the finance and energy economics literatures to develop an improved asset pricing model (the Augmented-Four-Factor Model or AFFM) in the context of the European energy utility sector. In addition, we undertake inter-sectoral and inter-temporal...

Changes in collateralization have been implicated in significant default (or near-default) events during the financial crisis, most notably with AIG. We have developed a framework for quantifying this effect based on moving between Merton-type and Black-Cox-type structural default models. Our...

The ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) concept has been increasingly adopted in financial markets, this paper studies the evolving effect of corporate ESG performance on the stock returns in China’s stock markets. Utilizing the Paris Agreement and China’s President Xi’s pledge to...

This paper uses analysts' forecasts to estimate a share's equity duration, a measure of a company's average cash-flow maturity. We find that short duration equity is associated with high expected and realized returns, which cannot be attributed to the shares' systematic risk exposure as implied...

This study seeks to determine whether earnings announcements pose non-diversifiable volatility risk that commands a risk premium. We find that investors anticipate some earnings announcements to convey news that increases market return volatility and pay a premium to hedge this non-diversifiable...

Compared with other developed stock markets, the Chinese stock market has a unique informational and trading environment. Given this unique environment, we find that intangible information (which is orthogonal to past accounting information) and arbitrage risk are potential sources of the value...

Across multiple measures of “liquidity” and a variety of methods to control for correlated characteristics of more (less) liquid bonds, we find only limited evidence of a liquidity premium in the cross section of corporate bonds. Specifically, while illiquid bonds have slightly higher credit...