Credit default swaps (CDS) are similar to out-of-the-money put options in that both offer a low cost and effective protection against downside risk. This study investigates whether put option-implied volatility is an important determinant of CDS pricing. Using a large sample of firms with both...

How do bondholders view the existence of an open market for corporate control? Between 1985 and 1991, 30 states in the U.S. enacted business combination (BC) laws, raising the cost of corporate takeovers. Relying on these exogenous events, we estimate the influence of the market for corporate...

We examine the incidence of operational losses among U.S. financial institutions using publicly reported loss data from 1980 to 2005. We show that most operational losses can be traced to a breakdown of internal control, and that firms suffering from these losses tend to be younger, more...

Using the industry benchmark CreditGrades model to analyze credit default swap (CDS) spreads across a large number of companies during the 2007-09 credit crisis, the authors demonstrate that the performance of the model can be significantly improved by calibrating it with option-implied...

Motivated by an extensive literature showing that government bond yields exhibit a strong non-Markov property, in the sense that moving averages of long-lagged yields significantly improve the predictability of excess bond returns. We then develop a systematic approach of constructing non-Markov...