Credit reports are used in nearly all consumer lending decisions and, increasingly, in hiring decisions in the labor market, but the impact of a bad credit report is largely unknown. We study the effects of credit reports on financial and labor market outcomes using a difference-in-differences...

Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...

The existing weight of evidence suggests that financial structure (the classification of a financial system as bank-based versus market-based) is irrelevant for economic growth. This contradicts the common belief that the institutional structure of a financial system matters. We re-examine this...

We show that the difference between the natural rate of interest and the current level of monetary policy stance, which we label Convergence Gap (CG), contains information that is valuable for bond predictability. Adding CG in forecasting regressions of bond excess returns significantly raises...

Non-bank financing provides an important funding source for the economy and is a valuable alternative to traditional banking. It helps enhance the efficiency and resiliency of the financial system while giving customers more choices for their financial services. Unlike banking, it is not...

The main aim of this work is to price defaultable bonds. In order to achieve this goal we link first hitting densities of Brownian motion with functionals of controlled diffusions. From a practical point of view examples of diffusions with this property are: Brownian motion with linear drift,...

We introduce a simple game-theoretical model that captures the main aspects of the repeated interaction between an issuer and a credit-rating agency. It involves up-front payments of issuer-fees and direct publication of requested ratings. Due to pecuniary injuries for untruthful ratings, the...

International capital flows to developing countries have taken on considerable policy importance in recent years. There is disagreement, however, about whether financial capital mobility has become so high that developing countries have little ability to sterilize capital flows. This paper...

This paper considers financial, operational, solvency, and performance ratios, in order to detect when there were balance sheets’ variations related to the 1994 Mexican currency crisis. Quarterly results for 88 non-financial Mexican companies that survived the crisis are used, and tests for...

A credit default swap (CDS) is a financial contract in which the holder of the instrument will be compensated in the event of a loan default. When available, CDS's are used to monitor the credit risk of countries and companies. In this work we develop a closed form procedure to value a CDS in...