Scholars have roundly criticized disclosure as a regulatory regime over the past decade for good reason. Disclosures—whether describing the terms of a loan or the risks of investing—purport to inform consumers. But who actually reads disclosures? We argue that mutual fund disclosures are...

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...

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...

Contingent Convertible bonds (CoCos) are debt instruments that convert into equity or are written down in times of distress. Existing pricing models assume conversion triggers based on market prices and on the assumption that markets can always observe all relevant firm information. But all...

Using political turnovers in mayoral appointments at the prefecture-city level in China, we show that investors incorporate rising local political uncertainty into bond pricing and relocate capital from municipal corporate bonds and privately issued bonds toward bonds issued by centrally...

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 examines whether and how differences in investors' information environment are related to cross-country differences in the market risk premium volatility. We use the vector-autoregressive and implied cost of capital methods to extract time variation in risk premiums for 41 developed...

Treasury securities normally possess unparalleled safety and liquidity and, consequently, carry a money premium. We use recent debt limit impasses, which temporarily increased the riskiness of Treasuries, to investigate the relationship between the money premium, safety, and liquidity. Our...

I empirically show that underpricing of uniform-price U.S. Treasury auctions is explained by risk premia. I posit that intermediaries demand a risk premium to offset future secondary market price uncertainty, in which uncertainty is captured by treasury auction return volatility, which is...

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the impacts that rare disasters can have on credit markets. We discuss and quantify the asset-pricing implications of disaster risk on the risk-free rate, credit spreads, and their term structures. The findings underscore the heterogeneous effects of...