This paper develops dynamic measures of the systemic risk of the financial sector as a whole. It defines systemic risk as the conditional probability of failure of a sufficiently large fraction of the total population of financial institutions. This definition recognizes that the cause of...

We prove a law of large numbers for the loss from default and use it for approximating the distribution of the loss from default in large, potentially heterogenous portfolios. The density of the limiting measure is shown to solve a non-linear SPDE, and the moments of the limiting measure are...

Using an extensive new data set on corporate bond defaults in the U.S. from 1866 to 2010, we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises. During the past 150 years, the U.S. has experienced many severe corporate default crises...

We study corporate bond default rates using an extensive new data set spanning the 1866-2008 period. We find that the corporate bond market has repeatedly suffered clustered default events much worse than those experienced during the Great Depression. For example, during the railroad crisis of...