"The link between commodities prices and the business cycle, including variables such as real GDP, industrial production, unemployment, inflation, and market uncertainty, has often be debated in the macroeconomic literature. To quantify the impact of commodities on the economy, one can...

Asset Pricing, Default Risk. - The central question of this thesis is whether firm distress risk explains stock returns. This question is important because it has been suspected that distress risk might reconcile a growing evidence on patterns in returns, which are otherwise hard to explain,...