This paper mines the experience of capital markets during the 19th century to propose an alternative way of interpreting international default episodes. The standard view is that defaulting on sovereign debt entails exclusion from capital markets. Yet we have observed multiple instances of...

The Dodd-Frank Act will eliminate the requirement that credit products must be rated before they can be sold to banks and pension funds. Supporters argue that if the information in ratings is valuable, issuers or investors will choose to buy the information, even without the requirement. But...

"We propose an arbitrage-free stochastic discount factor (SDF) model that jointly prices the cross-section of returns on portfolios of stocks sorted on book-to-market dimension, the cross-section of government bonds sorted by maturity, the dynamics of bond yields, and time series variation in...