The paper investigates the extent to which Italian corporate default correlation is due to the common dependence on macroeconomic (systematic) risk factors or, else, to other possibly unobservable factors arising from business inter-connections. Data on corporate default frequencies are taken...

The aim of the paper is to understand the interaction between market and credit risk. Using a comprehensive set of Italian data, we apply a factor model to identify the common sources of risk driving fluctuations in the real and financial sectors. The common latent factors are then inserted in a...