Recessions are often accompanied by spikes of corporate default and prolonged declines of business credit. This paper shows that credit and default cycles can result from variations of self-fullling beliefs about credit market conditions. We develop a tractable macroeconomic model in which...

Default recovery rates in the US are highly volatile and pro-cyclical. We show that state-of-the-art models with a Bernanke-Gertler-Gilchrist financial accelerator mechanism imply that recovery rates are flat over the cycle. We propose a model where financially-constrained entrepreneurs face an...

We estimate a model of natural default probabilities conditional on credit ratings and macroeconomic drivers. The output is an issuer-specific expected default rate at variable horizons, which can be combined to form an expected default rate for a given portfolio of rated credits. This permits...