The paper analyzes and quantifies the importance of sovereign risk in determining corporate default premia (yield spreads). It also investigates the extent to which the practice by rating agencies and banks of not rating companies higher than their sovereign ("country or sovereign ceiling") is...

There is strong evidence that interest rates and bond yield movements exhibit both stochastic volatility and unanticipated jumps. The presence of frequent jumps makes it natural to ask whether there is a premium for jump risk embedded in observed bond yields. This paper identifies a class of...

We examine risk spreads charged on corporate bonds placed by emerging market borrowers on international exchanges. While global developments have an important effect on spreads, changes in firm-level default risk also matter significantly in a way consistent with theory and experience in mature...

We estimate a latent factor model that decomposes international stock returns into global, country-, and industry-specific shocks and allows for stock-specific exposures to these shocks. We find that across stocks there is substantial dispersion in these exposures, which is partly explained by...