"We estimate plant--level idiosyncratic risk in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Our proxy for risk is the volatility of the portion of TFP growth which is not explained by either industry- or economy-wide factors, or by establishments' characteristics systematically associated with growth itself....

"This paper examines the movements of the Distance to Default (DD), a market-based measure of corporate default risk, of eight failed Japanese banks in order to evaluate the predictive power of the DD measure for bank failures. The DD became smaller in anticipation of failure in many cases. The...