Credit Risk and Disaster Risk
46 Pages Posted: 31 Jan 2011
There are 2 versions of this paper
Credit Risk and Disaster Risk
Date Written: January 2011
Abstract
Macroeconomic models with financial frictions typically imply that the excess return on a well-diversified portfolio of corporate bonds is close to zero. In contrast, the empirical finance literature documents large and time-varying risk premia in the corporate bond market (the "credit spread puzzle"). This paper introduces a parsimonious real business cycle model where firms issue defaultable debt and equity to finance investment. The mix between debt and equity is determined by a trade-off between tax savings and bankruptcy costs. By their very nature, corporate bonds, while safe in normal times, are highly exposed to the risk of economic depression. This motivates introducing a small, time-varying risk of large economic disaster. This simple feature generates large, volatile and countercyclical credit spreads as well as novel business cycle implications. An increase in disaster risk makes default more systematic, leading to higher risk premia, and higher expected discounted bankruptcy costs, hence worsening financial frictions. This leads to a reduction in investment, output, and leverage. Financial frictions amplify significantly the effects of disaster risk: the response of investment and output is about three times larger than in the frictionless model.
Keywords: asset pricing, business cycles, credit spread puzzle, disasters, equity premium, financial accelerator, financial frictions, jumps, rare events, systematic risk, time-varying risk premium
JEL Classification: E32, E44, G12
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Asset Pricing in a Production Economy with Chew-Dekel Preferences
By Claudio Campanale, Rui Castro, ...
-
Asset Pricing in a Production Economy with Chew-Dekel Preferences
By Claudio Campanale, Rui Castro, ...