[...]This paper aims to ascertain the quality (that is, thepredictive power and prediction errors) of two marketindicators: the distance to default and the subordinated debtspread. Previous work has established that banks’ marketprices reflect contemporaneous information about bank riskin the...

We analyse the ability of the distance-to-default and bond spreads to signal bank fragility. We show that both indicators are complete and unbiased and that spreads are non-linear in the probability of bank default. We empirically test these properties in a sample of EU banks. We find leading...