The slope of a firm's term structure of credit default swap (CDS) spreads (five-year spread minus one-year spread) negatively predicts future stock returns. Stocks with low CDS slope on average outperform stocks with high CDS slope by over 1% each month for the next six months. Our result can...

Introduction -- Part I Fundamentals: Credit Derivatives and Markets -- Mathematical Preliminaries -- Part II Static Models: One Factor Gaussian Copula Model -- Normal Inverse Gaussian Factor Copula Model -- Part III: Term-Structure Models -- Large Homogeneous Cell Approximation for Factor Copula...