Agency mortgage backed securities (MBS) with diverse characteristics are traded in parallel with individualized contracts in the specified pool (SP) market and with standardized contracts in the to-be-announced (TBA) market. We find that this unique parallel trading environment significantly...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

We build a dynamic model to link two empirical patterns:\ the negative failure probability-return relation (Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi, 2008) and the positive distress risk premium-return relation (Friewald, Wagner, and Zechner, 2014). We show analytically and quantitatively that (i)...