We explore how general economic conditions impact defaults and major credit rating changes by fitting reduced-form Cox intensity models with a broad range of macroeconomic and firm-specific ratings-related variables. For all corporate issuers in the period 1981 2002 we find both types of factors strongly influenced the risk of a credit event. However, while the effects of ratings-related factor...

Many stockholders irrationally believe that high recent market returns predict high future market returns. I argue that the presence of these extrapolative investors can help resolve the equity premium puzzle if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) is greater than unity. Extrapolators’ overreaction to dividend news generates countercyclical expected returns. Rational investors res...

This paper revisits the time-series relation between the conditional risk premium and variance of the equity market portfolio. The main innovation is that we construct a measure of the ex ante equity market risk premium using corporate bond yield spread data. This measure is forward-looking and does not rely critically on either realized equity returns or instrumental variables. We find strong ...

The paper, motivated by the extent of government involvement in the financial sectors of many countries, presents a model of a link between financial intermediation and economic growth. The model conceptualises a financial leverage coefficient, a construct which is the outcome of aggravated moral hazard generated by a combination of government involvement in financial intermediation and the pre...

Empirical evidence documents a tight link between aggregate and firm-level investment and corporate credit spreads. Moreover, it has been shown that credit spreads largely reflect a compensation for bearing macroeconoimc risks. We use a tractable model with recursive preferences and time varying macroeoconomic risk to investigate the link between aggregate risk and corporate policies in a produ...

This paper is a contribution to the literature on the factors behind financial stability, focusing on monetary policy design. In particular, it assesses empirically for a sample of 79 countries in the period 1970 to 2000 whether the choice of the central bank objectives and the monetary policy strategy affect financial stability. We find that focusing the central bank objectives on price stabil...

We develop a simple model of credit market imperfections, in which the agents have access to a variety of investment projects, which differ in productivity, in the investment size, and in the severity of the agency problems behind the borrowing constraints. A movement in borrower net worth can shift the composition of the credit between projects with different productivity levels. The model thu...

This paper analyzes the role of money in asset markets characterized by search frictions. We develop a dynamic framework that brings together a model for illiquid financial assets à la Duffie, Gârleanu, and Pedersen, and a search-theoretic model of monetary exchange à la Lagos and Wright. The presence of decentralized financial markets generates an essential role for money, which helps investor...

An integrated monetary growth model of Keynes–Metzler–Goodwin type with a portfolio approach to its three asset markets (money, bonds, equities) is introduced to study the interaction between the real and the financial part of market economies. Beneath expectations and governmental behavior, profits and their implied dividend payments influence the behavior of asset markets, which determine int...

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we exploit copula methodology, with two threshold GARCH models as marginals, to construct a bivariate copula-threshold-GARCH model, simultaneously capturing asymmetric nonlinear behaviour in univariate stock returns of spot and futures markets and bivariate dependency, in a flexible manner. Two elliptical copulas (Gaussian and Student’s-t) and t...