Controlling for numerous attributes tied to default and priced asset risk, including yield, credit spread, bond rating, and maturity, we find that a corporate bond’s book value divided by its market price strongly predicts its return. Bonds with the 20% highest “bond book-to-market ratios”...

Controlling for numerous attributes tied to default and priced asset risk, including yield, credit spread, bond rating, and maturity, we find that a corporate bond’s book value divided by its market price strongly predicts its return. Bonds with the 20% highest “bond book-to-market ratios”...

This paper shows that defined benefit pension and health care plans are important for firm leverage around the world. While consolidating off-balance sheet post-retirement plans typically increases effective leverage by 32%, firms reduce their level of regular debt by only 22 cents for every...

Using point-in-time accounting data, we estimate monthly fair values of 25,000 stocks from 36 countries. A trading strategy based on deviations from fair value earns significant risk-adjusted returns (“alpha”) in most regions, especially the Asia Pacific, that are unrelated to known...

We analyze the impact of the introduction of credit default swaps (CDS) on real decision making within the firm and the influence of firms' local economic and legal environments on that impact. We extend the model of Bolton and Oehmke (2011) to take into account uncertainty about whether the...

This paper examines two different option markets to test whether differences in the level of adverse selection faced by market makers affects the size of bid-ask spreads. The data are from bank-issued options that trade on EuWax, where market makers face little adverse selection and traditional...

This paper investigates the motivations and practice of nonfinancial firms with regard to using financial options in their risk management activities. To this end, it provides a comprehensive account of the existing empirical evidence on the use of derivatives in general and options in...

In the presence of deviations from parity conditions such as purchasing power parity and the international Fisher effect, non-financial corporations are confronted with risks stemming from the impact of unexpected exchange rate changes on the value of the firm, especially in the short and the...

Using a unique and comprehensive dataset, this paper develops and uses three distinct methods to quantify the risk of a systemic failure in the global banking system. We examine a sample of 334 banks (representing 80% of global bank equity) in 28 countries around 5 global financial crises (such...

A time-varying copula model is used to investigate the impact of the introduction of the Euro on the dependence between seventeen European stock markets during the period 1994-2003. The model is implemented with a GJR-GARCH-MA-t model for the marginal distributions and the Gaussian copula for...