We study the relation between the credit cycle and macro-economic fundamentals in an intensity-based framework. Using rating transition and default data of U.S. corporates from Standard and Poor’s over the period 1980-2005 we directly estimate the credit cycle from the micro rating data. We...

In 2015, 70% of newly-issued leveraged loans had weaker enforcement features, called covenant-light or "cov-lite;" this is nearly a three-time increase in cov-lite issuance compared to a previous peak in 2007. We evaluate whether this development can be attributed to market overheating, increased...

Both domestic economies and financial markets are affected by cycles that are often represented through multi-state models such as Markov Switching models. This article discusses the performances associated to the government bond, the equity and the credit cases along the business cycle, using...

The paper constitutes a discussion of the rise of Peer to Peer loans as alternative investments. Peer to Peer loans are being incorporated into portfolios in the interest of diversification. This paper outlines the strategy and provides a guided tour to this new alternative asset class, along...

This paper investigates the application of factor investing in corporate bonds. Our results show that proficiency in the drivers of risk and return, the factors, should be used for bottom-up corporate bond selection. We analyze five different factors (Value, Equity Momentum, Carry, Quality,...

The recent global financial crisis has shown portfolio correlations between agents as one of the key channels of risk contagion and amplification. In this work, we analyse the structure and dynamics of the cross-correlation matrix of banks' loan portfolios in the yearly bank-firm credit network...

We investigate the impact of geographic diversification on the provision of credit during a financial bust. We find that during the Nicaraguan microlending crisis, lenders reduced overall credit provision but to a lesser extent to those geographic areas that contributed most to geographic...

We use supervisory data to investigate risk taking in the U.S. syndicated loan market at a time when longer-term interest rates are exceptionally low, and we study the ex-ante credit risk of loans acquired by different types of lenders, including banks and shadow banks. We find that insurance...

We exploit staggered removals of interstate banking restrictions to identify the effect of access to credit on households' stock market participation and asset allocation. Using micro data on retail brokerage accounts and proprietary data on personal credit histories, we document two effects of...

We consider the problem of maximizing expected utility for a power investor who can allocate his wealth in a stock, a defaultable security, and a money market account. The dynamics of these security prices are governed by geometric Brownian motions modulated by a hidden continuous time finite...