Most extant structural credit risk models underestimate credit spreads while matching default rates, recoveries, leverage, and equity risk premia - a shortcoming known as the credit spread puzzle. We calibrate and estimate a model able to explain medium to long-term credit spreads by...

We show that the slight possibility of a macroeconomic disaster of moderate magnitude can explain important features across credit, option, and equity markets. Our consumption-based equilibrium model captures the empirical level and volatility of credit spreads, generates a flexible credit term...

This article studies the pricing implications of learning about arrivals of economic disasters and the subsequent recoveries. We model a disaster as a separate phase, and transitions between the disaster and the normal phase introduce structual changes to the consumption process which triggers...

This paper proposes a preference-based general equilibrium model that explains the pricing of the S&P 500 index options since the 1987 market crash. The central ingredients are a peso component in the consumption growth rate and the time-varying risk aversion induced by habit formation that...