Recent research by Elton et al (2001) argues that investment-quality defaultable debt spreads reflect three factors: expected losses, risk premiums and taxes. In this paper, we sort bond price data on liquidity proxies (quote frequency, bond age and issue size) and show that an important...

We study the consistency of the credit-risk orderings implicit in ratings and bond market yields. By analyzing errors in term structure estimates for bonds with particular ratings, we show that for significant periods, a quarter of some categories of high credit quality bonds are rated in a...

In this paper we provide new evidence on the predictability of aggregate stock market returns, and new time series of the expected excess returns on common stocks. We extract aggregate discount rate news from equity portfolio returns and use this information to construct estimates of expected...

We study a broad class of asset pricing models in which the stochastic discount factor (SDF) can be factorized into an observable component (e.g., a parametric function of consumption) and a potentially unobservable one (e.g., habit level or the return on total wealth). Exploiting this...

This paper develops a new approach to examining the time variation of risk premia within the framework of conditional asset pricing models. By combining conditional factor models with approximate present-value relationships we derive a linear relationship between the log stock price and...

We present new evidence on the predictability of aggregate market returns by developing two new prediction models, one risk-based, and the other purely statistical. The pricing kernel model expresses the expected return as the covariance of the market return with a pricing kernel that is a...