This paper examines the relation between industry competition, credit spreads, and levered equity returns. I build a quantitative model where firms make investment, financing, and default decisions subject to aggregate and idiosyncratic risk. Firms operate in heterogeneous industries that differ...

Lack of shareholders' commitment about debt and investment policies increases the cost of debt by a quantity that we refer to as the agency (credit) spread. The agency spread increases with the number of periods for which debt holders are exposed to policies that decrease the value of debt: from...

The investment premium -- the finding that firms with low asset growth deliver high average returns -- is an integral part of recent factor models. I document empirically that the investment premium (1) reflects leverage, (2) does not exist among zero-leverage firms, and (3) increases with...

The Equity risk-premium and volatility puzzle - is it possible to have a high equity premium and a low risk-free rate with a plausible risk aversion- have received a great deal of attention but beyond this question, the fundamental issues of that puzzle are the followings: what are the economic...

I propose a neoclassical production economy with costly external financing, partial investment irreversibility, and endogenous investment/financing decisions to rationalize and quantify the well-documented interaction between the book-to-market equity effect and the financial leverage effect in...

Investors have to be offered risk premiums to invest in risky assets. These risk premiums take different forms in different asset markets: equity risk premiums (ERP) in stock markets, default spreads in bond markets and real asset premiums in other asset markets. These premiums have their roots...

The Equity risk-premium and volatility puzzles: Is it possible to have a high-equity premium and a low risk-free rate, and a high volatile stock return, have received a great deal of attention but beyond this, the fundamental issues are the following: What are the economic representations that...

The empirical tests of traditional structural models of credit risk tend to indicate that such models have been unsuccessful in the modeling of credit spreads. To address these negative findings some authors introduce single-factor stochastic volatility specifications and/or jumps.In the yield...

In this article we illustrate how to price bonds and calculate the accrued interest, clean- and dirty price, from which we can compute a bond invoice i.e., the present value for a given cash investment in the bond. We present the classical bond pricing formulae and show how to modify this...

Preqin and Pitchbook data are classified and analyzed to derive a coherent set of risk-return assumptions to combine with Listed liquid assets in a traditional mean-variance framework. We find expected returns of 11%-12% for PE and 8% for PD, PC detailed per subclass. Risk is decomposed in Class...