This paper uses contingent claim asset pricing and exploits capital structure priority to better understand the relation between corporate security returns and interest rate changes (i.e., duration). We show theoretically and, using a novel dataset, confirm empirically that lower priority...

There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the apparent weak or negative relation between risk (conditional variance) and return (expected returns) in the aggregate stock market. We develop and estimate an empirical model based on the ICAPM to investigate this relation.(...)