This paper examines the relation between industry competition, credit spreads, and levered equity returns. I build a quantitative model where firms make investment, financing, and default decisions subject to aggregate and idiosyncratic risk. Firms operate in heterogeneous industries that differ...

We embed a structural model of credit risk inside a dynamic continuous-time consumption-based asset pricing model, which allows us to price equity and corporate debt in a unified framework. Our key economic assumptions are that the first and second moments of earnings and consumption growth...

We study to what extent firms spread out their debt maturity dates across time, which we call "granularity of corporate debt." We consider the role of debt granularity using a simple model in which a firm's inability to roll over expiring debt causes inefficiencies, such as costly asset sales or...

We document a strong positive cross-sectional relation between corporate bond yield spreads and bond return volatilities. As corporate bond prices are generally attributable to both credit risk and illiquidity as discussed in Huang and Huang (2012), we apply a decomposition methodology to...

We provide a framework for the analysis of term structures of credit spreads on corporate bonds in the presence of informational asymmetries. While bond investors observe default incidents, we suppose that they have incomplete information on the firm's assets and/or the threshold asset level at...

Empirical studies on credit spread determinants are predicated on the presence of a single-regime over the entire sample period and thus find limited explanatory power. We show that a single regime model hides the fact that the explanatory variables take on different loadings across changing...

We present a novel empirical benchmark for analyzing credit risk using “pseudo firms” that purchase traded assets financed with equity and zero-coupon bonds. By no-arbitrage, pseudo bonds are equivalent to Treasuries minus put options on pseudo-firm assets. Empirically, like corporate...

This article studies the economic factors behind corporate default risk premia in Europe during the period 2006–2010. We employ information embedded in Credit Default Swap (CDS) contracts to quantify expected excess returns from the underlying bonds in market-wide default circumstances. We...

The spread risk premium component of credit default swap (CDS) spreads represents a compensation demanded by protection sellers for future changes in CDS spreads caused by unpredictable fluctuations in the reference entity's risk-neutral default intensity. This paper defines and estimates a...

We find that consumer confidence, proxied by consumers’ expectation of the business condition during the next 12 months, is negatively related to the credit spreads of corporate bonds. This relation cannot be explained by the traditional macro, firm-, and bond-level control variables....