The introduction of the Euro has led to price level stability and fostered growth within the European Union. Consequently, since its launch as a store of value and unit of account, there has been a clear convergence between the yield of France's sovereign debt and German benchmark. This paper...

The introduction of the Euro has led to price level stability and fostered growth within the European Union. Consequently, since its launch as a store of value and unit of account, there has been a clear convergence between the yield of France’s sovereign debt and German benchmark. This paper...

Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire-sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of...

We document a strong positive cross-sectional relation between corporate bond yield spreads and bond return volatilities. As corporate bond prices are generally attributable to both credit risk and illiquidity as discussed in Huang and Huang (2012), we apply a decomposition methodology to...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between TV news coverage and the GIIPS countries' bond yield spreads using daily data between January 1, 2007 and December 1, 2016. We employ 1,542,233 human coded news items from evening news shows of leading TV stations in 12 countries which...

This paper adopts a novel approach to studying the evolution of interest rate term structure over the U.S. business cycles and to predicting recessions. Applying an effective algorithm, I classify the Treasury yield curve into distinct shapes and find the less frequent shapes intrinsically...

Does democratization reduce the cost of credit? Using global syndicated loan data from 1984 to 2014, we find that democratization has a sizeable negative effect on loan spreads: a one-point increase in the zero-to-ten Polity IV index of democracy shaves at least 19 basis points off spreads, but...

We examine how accounting-based compensation plans influence a firm's contracts with its creditors. After granting long-term accounting-based compensation plans (LTAPs) to CEOs, firms pay lower spreads and have fewer restrictive covenants in new bank loans. Mechanisms leading to lower borrowing...