We investigate why spreads on corporate bonds are so much larger than expected losses from default. Systematic factors make very little contribution to spreads, even if higher moments or downside effects are taken into account. Instead we find that sizes of spreads are strongly related to...

Dichev [2007. American Economic Review 97, 386-401], in an influential paper, examines the gap between the performance of major stock markets and the dollar-weighted performance of investors in these markets. He finds a significant gap of 1.3 percent per year for NYSE/AMEX and 1.5 percent...

Systemic risk is a key concern for central banks charged with safeguarding overall financial stability. In this paper we investigate how systemic risk is affected by the structure of the financial system. We construct banking systems that are composed of a number of banks that are connected by...

With an increasingly integrated global financial system, we frequently observe that shocks to individual asset markets affect financial markets worldwide. The aim of this paper is to quantify the co-movements between bond markets in the US and emerging market economies using daily data from...