We examine how regulatory uncertainty impacts the credit spreads of covered bonds issued by U.S. domiciled banks. Using data on covered bonds issued by Washington Mutual and Bank of America, for the September 2006 to December 2016 period, we find that investors require an incremental spread that...

Prior literature documents mixed evidence about how research and development activities affect corporate creditworthiness. We investigate whether publicly available patent information is incrementally useful in assessing the benefits and risks of corporate innovation from bondholders'...

We propose a tractable bond pricing model in which managers have an informational advantage over creditors. We show that, regardless of how poor their private signal is, managers of firms that can access the credit market will avoid default by issuing new debt to service existing debt....

Prior literature mostly finds bond yield spreads to be insufficiently explained by credit risk (the 'credit spread puzzle'). Recently, Feldhütter and Schaefer (2018) and Bai et al. (2020) revived this debate. We utilize the removal of sovereign guarantees for savings banks and state banks in...

This paper proposes a risk-based explanation of the negative relation between credit spreads and expected equity returns found in the data. In a model where issuing equity is costly and debt has a tax advantage, firms optimally choose a lower net leverage if their cash flows are more correlated...

This paper studies the differential credit risks embedded in the cross-section of credit spreads. Using corporate bond data from 1999 to 2018, we find that credit spreads relative to those of peers — defined as bonds with the same stated credit rating — contain reliable information about...

Structural models of default can identify asset value dynamics and the location of the default boundary from either (observable) credit spreads or (latent) default probabilities. The latter approach uses historical default rates as proxies, which provide such low statistical power that...

We find a significant positive relation between changes in policy uncertainty and changes in credit spreads. Macroeconomic conditions, including general uncertainty, do not explain this result, which also holds when we use instrumental variables to address endogeneity issues. Policy uncertainty...

This paper explores the dynamic relationship between stock market implied credit spreads, CDS spreads, and bond spreads. A general VECM representation is proposed for changes in the three credit spread measures which accounts for zero, one, or two independent cointegration equations, depending...

We tweak the conventional Merton model to account for the asymmetric properties of assets returns and investors asymmetric behavior toward the upside potential of gain versus the downside risk of loss. Using an asymmetric split normal distribution, we capture empirical asymmetries in the...