We present a novel empirical benchmark for analyzing credit risk using “pseudo firms” that purchase traded assets financed with equity and zero-coupon bonds. By no-arbitrage, pseudo bonds are equivalent to Treasuries minus put options on pseudo-firm assets. Empirically, like corporate...

During 2008, the sudden widening of credit spreads led to a rapid decrease in the value of many financial assets, revealing a general shortage of capital for many financial institutions, with some critical peaks that required fund injection and public bailouts.The evidence of a substantial...

Abstract: In this paper we compare market prices of credit default swaps with model prices. We show that a simple reduced form model with a constant recovery rate outperforms the market practice of directly comparing bonds' credit spreads to default swap premiums. We find that the model works...

The shape of the yield curve determines the relationship between interest rate risk and return of investments. Should the longterm oriented investor or financier choose short- or long term bonds or loans? The management decision of the “right” maturity depends on three form-giving factors of...

The London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) is a set of vital benchmark interest rates to which hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial contracts are tied. The rates are set each day via a survey of large banks. In recent years, strange behavior of the rates have caused observers to question...

We propose a smooth shadow-rate version of the dynamic Nelson-Siegel (DNS) model to analyze the term structure of interest rates during the recent zero lower bound (ZLB) period. By relaxing the no-arbitrage restriction, our shadow-rate model becomes highly tractable with a closed-form yield...

The existence of the credit derivatives written on the eurobonds such as credit default swaps or asset swaps allows policymakers and investors to monitor the evolvement of credit risk. However, these instruments are mostly available in advanced economies, whereas the market for credit...

We use outages as natural experiments to study sovereign bond market functioning. When the euro area futures market goes down, trading activity on the cash market declines, liquidity evaporates, and transaction prices deviate from fundamental values. Tracing back this macro-level market...

Explanations of why changes in the relative quantities of safe debt seem to affect asset prices often appeal informally to a portfolio balance mechanism. I show how this type of effect can be incorporated in a general class of structural, arbitrage-free asset-pricing models using a numerical...

It is well-known that interest rates are extremely persistent, yet they are best modeled and understood as stationary processes. These properties are contradictory in the workhorse Gaussian affine term structure model in which persistent data often result in unit roots that imply...