Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire-sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of...

We estimate a reduced-form model of credit risk that incorporates stochastic volatility in default intensity via stochastic time-change. Our Bayesian MCMC estimation method overcomes nonlinearity in the measurement equation and state-dependent volatility in the state equation. We implement on...

Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) are frequently thought of as risk-free real bonds. Using no-arbitrage term structure models, we show that TIPS yields exceeded risk-free real yields by as much as 100 basis points when TIPS were first issued and up to 300 basis points during the...

Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) are frequently thought of as risk-free real bonds. Using no-arbitrage term structure models, we show that TIPS yields exceeded risk-free real yields by as much as 100 basis points when TIPS were first issued and up to 300 basis points during the...

This paper studies optimal debt maturity in an economy with repayment enforcement frictions and investors disagree about repayment probabilities. The optimal debt maturity choice is a mix of long- and short-term debt securities. Spreading risky debt claims on cash flows over time allows debt to...

We study how banks manage their default risk to optimally negotiate quantities and prices of contracts in over-the-counter markets. We show that costly actions exerted by banks to reduce their default probabilities are inefficient. Negative externalities due to counterparty concentration may...

We find that firm-level variance risk premium, estimated as the difference between option-implied and expected variances, has a prominent explanatory power for credit spreads in the presence of market- and firm-level risk control variables identified in the existing literature. Such a...

This paper highlights two new effects of credit default swap markets (CDS) in a general equilibrium setting. First, when firms' cash flows are correlated, CDSs impact the cost of capital{credit spreads{and investment for all firms, even those that are not CDS reference entities. Second, when...

We quantify the effect of refinancing risk on euro area money market spreads, a major factor driving spreads during the financing crisis. With the advent of the crisis, market participants' perception of their ability to refinance over a given period of time changed radically. As a result,...

We estimate asset pricing models with multiple risks: long-run growth, long-run volatility, habit, and a residual. The Bayesian estimation accounts for the entire likelihood of consumption, dividends, and the price-dividend ratio. We find that the residual represents at least 80% of the variance...