Market reports in the summer of 2016 suggest that Venezuela is on the brink of default on upwards of $65 billion in debt. That debt comprises of bonds issued directly by the sovereign and those issued by the state-owned oil company PDVSA. Based on the bond contracts and other legal factors, it...

On January 1, 2013, it became mandatory that every new sovereign bond issued by a member of the European Monetary Union include a new contract clause called a Collective Action Clause or CAC. This, we believe, constituted the biggest one-time change to the terms of sovereign debt contracts in...

How do European stocks react to rating actions issued by Rating Agencies' Since rating agencies process private information and spread it on financial markets through upgrades and downgrades, stock investors should react to rating announcements conveying good or bad news. Using a Pan-European...

Syndication gives originating banks the opportunity to diversify part of their credit risk by selling loans to other members of the syndicate. However, as originating banks are less exposed to risk, their incentives to monitor borrowers diminish. We explore this trade-off with a theoretical...

We study the impact of sovereign risk on the credit risk of the non-financial corporate sector in the Eurozone using credit default swap data. We show that an increase in sovereign risk is associated with a statistically and economically significant increase in corporate credit risk and, hence,...

An implication of the incompleteness of contracts is that there are going to be gaps and ambiguities that either side can exploit. We ask whether the expectation that a counterparty is likely to act aggressively in its use of contract language impacts the price that market participants attach to...

In a market with informationally connected traders, the dynamics of volume, price informativeness, price volatility, and liquidity are severely affected by the information linkages every trader experiences with his peers. We show that in the presence of information linkages among traders, volume...