Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 15.
(refine search)
Journal Article
Understanding aggregate default rates of high yield bonds
The New York-New Jersey region's hard-earned recovery in employment is being overshadowed by ongoing job losses in certain sectors and the prospect of moderating growth in the United States as a whole. Fortunately, several positive trends are bolstering the region's employment picture. Strength in the services sector, a falloff in restructuring, and gains in income point to continuing--though modest--regional job growth in 1996.
Working Paper
Initial public offerings in hot and cold markets
Asymmetric information models characterize hot IPO markets as periods when better quality firms have an incentive to issue equity, and cold markets when the lemons premium associated with equity is too high to draw in many issuers. Recent empirical evidence, however, suggests that firms that issue in hot markets are a major source of stock price underperformance of equity issuers. We investigate these opposing views with data on IPO firms that issued in 1983, a hot market, and 1988, a cold market. We find that the two sets of firms have similar operating performance, but stock returns are ...
Report
Stock market valuation indicators: is this time different?
Record low dividend yields and record high market-to-book ratios in recent months have led many market watchers to conclude that these indicators now behave differently from how they have in the past. This paper examines the relationship between traditional market indicators and stock performance, and then addresses two popular claims that the meaning of these indicators has changed in recent years. The first is that dividend yields are permanently lower now than in the past because firms have increased their use of share repurchases as a tax-advantaged substitute for dividends. The second ...
Report
The slope of the credit yield curve for speculative-grade issuers
Many theoretical bond pricing models predict that the slope of the credit yield curve facing highly leveraged firms is negative. Previous empirical research by Sarig and Warga (1989) and Fons (1994) confirms this view of high yield bonds. We show that these results largely owe to sample selection bias associated with the debt maturity choice. When the credit quality of the issuer is held constant, as in the case of matched bond samples, the typical credit yield curve facing speculative-grade issuers is upward-sloping.
Report
On bounding credit event risk premia
Reduced-form models of default that attribute a large fraction of credit spreads to compensation for credit event risk typically preclude the most plausible economic justification for such risk to be priced--namely, a ?contagious? response of the market portfolio during the credit event. When this channel is introduced within a general equilibrium framework for an economy comprised of a large number of firms, credit event risk premia have an upper bound of just a few basis points and are dwarfed by the contagion premium. We provide empirical evidence supporting the view that credit event risk ...
Working Paper
Modeling credit contagion via the updating of fragile beliefs
We propose a tractable equilibrium model for pricing defaultable bonds that are subject to contagion risk. Contagion arises because agents with ?fragile beliefs? are uncertain about both the underlying state of the economy and the posterior probabilities associated with these states. As such, agents adopt a robust decision rule for updating that leads them to over-weight the posterior probabilities of ?bad? states. We estimate the model using panel data on sovereign Euro-zone CDS spreads during the recent crisis, and find that it captures levels and dynamics of spreads better than traditional ...