Credit grades are ordinal measures of default risk that are used to rank the relative creditworthiness of different borrowers rather than the relative safety of different environments. They are assigned by specialized rating agencies, which face short-term pressures to fudge their rankings and...

Like equity markets, credit markets seem chronically short-sighted. When debt is serviced regularly, creditors seem to get complacent about the risks. When default shocks them out of complacency, they seem to overreact. Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) contended that sovereign debt markets have been...

We characterize the long-run stable maturity distribution induced by a fixed issuance policy, defined as the maturity mix of new issues, thereby providing a method to link issuance policies with their long-run consequences. We derive closed-form expressions for a new class of forward-looking...

How does government borrowing affect corporate financing and investment? This paper focuses on the role that government debt plays in providing a safe and liquid store of value to the private sector. In the data, I show that firms interact with the market for government debt in two ways: first,...

In this paper we present a rigorously motivated pricing equation for derivatives, including general collateralization schemes, which is consistent with quoted market bond prices. Traditionally, there have been differences in how instruments with similar cash flow structures have been priced if...

Hall (2007) challenges a fundamental point in the analysis of Lally (2007) and earlier papers: if the risk free rate within the allowed rate of return matches the regulatory term, then the present value of future cash flows PV0 equals equity holders initial investment C(1-L). Hall argues that...

This paper examines the appropriate term of the risk free rate to be used by a regulator in price control situations, most particularly in the presence of corporate debt. If the regulator seeks to ensure that the present value of the future cash flows to equity holders equals their initial...

Recent literature has shown that corporate indebtedness affects firm-level investment behavior but not necessarily aggregate business cycles. I argue that interactions among heterogeneous firms play an important role in equilibrium. After a downturn, financially unconstrained firms in...

We analyze domestic, foreign, and central banks holdings of public debt for 31 countries for the period of 1989-2022, applying panel regressions and quantile analysis. We conclude that an increase in sovereign risk raises the share of domestic banks' portfolio of public debt and reduces the...