This paper shows that geographical investor heterogeneity strongly influences sovereign risk. While standard sovereign debt models mainly attribute the absence of sovereign defaults to foreign creditor retaliation, a new theoretical literature argues that domestic creditors also affect borrowing...

The growth effects of international financial liberalization and integration are investigated using the methodology and data developed by Rajan and Zingales (1998). The main result is that industries highly dependent on external financing do not experience higher growth in value added in...

Abel (2002) shows that pessimism and doubt in the subjective distribution of the growth rate of consumption reduce the riskfree rate puzzle and the equity premium puzzle. We quantify the amount of pessimism and doubt in survey data on US consumption and income. Individual forecasters are in fact...

According to the classical view, an economy's lender of last resort should be its central bank. For brief periods of time, the bank might suspend convertibility in order to provide the liquidity needed to support the domestic credit market. Recent experience of financial crises demonstrates the...

We develop a structural bond pricing approach and implement it on a large panel of US industrial bonds using an efficient maximum likelihood methodology. We evaluate the model's ability to predict yield spread levels and changes out-of-sample. Errors are smaller and distinctly less variable than...