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I propose a life-cycle model where a finitely lived risk-averse household finances its housing investment by opting to provide a down payment. Given that the household may default, risk-neutral lenders efficiently charge a default premium to hedge against expected losses. This has two major consequences. First, the higher the house price volatility, the higher the down payment the household provides to decrease the volatility of the equity share in the house. Second, in the presence of borrowing constraints, higher risk of unemployment persistence and/or a substantial drop in labor income decreases the leveraged position the household takes on.

We model the dynamics of risk premia during crises in asset markets where the marginal investor is a financial intermediary. Intermediaries face an equity capital constraint. Risk premia rise when the constraint binds, reflecting the capital scarcity. The calibrated model matches the nonlinearity of risk premia during crises and the speed of reversion in risk premia from a crisis back to precrisis levels. We evaluate the effect of three government policies: reducing intermediaries borrowing costs, injecting equity capital, and purchasing distressed assets. Injecting equity capital is particularly effective because it alleviates the equity capital constraint that drives the model's crisis.

This article examines how in a context of limited enforceability of contracts suppliers may have a comparative advantage over banks in lending to customers because they are able to stop the supply of intermediate goods. Suppliers may act also as liquidity providers, insuring against liquidity shocks that could endanger the survival of their customer relationships. The relatively high implicit interest rates of trade credit are the result of insurance and default premiums that are amplified whenever suppliers face a relatively high cost of funds. I explore these effects empirically for a panel of UK firms.

We adopt a systemic risk indicator measured by the price of insurance against systemic financial distress and assess individual banks’ marginal contributions to the systemic risk. The methodology is applied using publicly available data to the 19 bank holding companies covered by the U.S. Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP), with the systemic risk indicator peaking around $1.1 trillion in March 2009. Our systemic risk contribution measure shows interesting similarity to and divergence from the SCAP loss estimates under stress test scenarios. In general, we find that a bank’s contribution to the systemic risk is roughly linear in its default probability but highly nonlinear with respect to institution size and asset correlation.

Despite theoretical and anecdotal evidence highlighting the importance of industry-level analyses to lenders, the empirical literature on debt pricing has focused almost exclusively on firm-level forces that affect expected loss. This paper provides empirical evidence that industry-level characteristics relate to debt pricing through risk premiums. We address the empirical challenges that arise when testing these theories by using a proprietary dataset of time-varying and forward-looking measures of industry characteristics. These characteristics include growth, sensitivity to external shocks, and industry structure, all measured at the six-digit NAICS level. Our results show that lenders demand higher spreads to bear industry-level risk. The relation exists within subsamples with constant credit ratings, and strengthens when lenders' loan portfolios are less diversified and during periods when diversification is difficult. Therefore, our results suggest that industry characteristics relate to debt pricing by informing lenders not only about expected loss, but also about risk premiums.

Default risk increases substantially during financial stress times due to mainly the two reasons: volatility clustering and investors’ desire to protect themselves from such increases in volatility. It manifested in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 with unpleasant outcomes of many bankruptcies and severe financial distress. To account for these features, we adapted the structural credit risk approach to include both time-varying (return) volatility and risk premium about the return volatility itself. By applying the model to US banks, we obtain better bank default indicators in comparison to the benchmark models.

This study sets up a contingent-claim framework incorporating the default risk of a mortgage insurer and the capital forbearance of regulators to value mortgage insurance (MI) contracts. We further investigate how critical policy parameters, such as capital requirements, prompt closure, and time of delay, relate to the MI premium by deriving a closed-form solution and evaluating its partial derivatives. The solutions show a negative cross effect of forbearance threshold and time delay on MI, indicating that a lower forbearance threshold and a longer period of time delay both expand their positive impacts on the price of MI. The numerical results show that an insurer’s default risk premium can be substantial in the presence of a catastrophic risk in the housing price. For mortgage insurers with a lower asset-liability ratio, the effect of the interest rate risk on the MI premium is more obvious and noteworthy. Moreover, the forbearance threshold effect and capital requirements effect are more significant than the time delay effect on the MI premium.

The interbank money market in the United States and Europe became turbulent during the financial crisis of 2007–2009, with the counterparty default risk premiums and liquidity premiums of short-term financing among major financial institutions rising sharply to unprecedented levels. Using various measures of macroeconomic and financial risks, I find that the surges in counterparty risk premiums were predominantly driven by heightened uncertainties about the macroeconomy and financial market, as well as underlying mortgage default risks. The new liquidity facility that the Federal Reserve established, the Term Auction Facility, significantly relieved the strains in the money market, primarily through lowering banks' liquidity concerns. Its effect on the counterparty risk premiums, however, has been quite limited.

Banks considered too-big-to-fail (TBTF) tend to benefit from funding cost advantages as their debt is considered implicitly guaranteed by public authorities, even if the latter have undertaken substantial effort to limit TBTF. This paper focuses on the changes in related market perceptions in response to bank regulatory and resolution reform announcements as well as actual failure resolution actions. It analyses how premia on risky bank debt have reacted to such events, using data for senior and subordinated debt CDS quotes for 45 European banks from January 2007 to May 2020. The empirical results are consistent with progress being made in reducing the value of implicit bank debt guarantees, especially on subordinated bank liabilities. Some earlier bank failure resolution actions appeared to significantly raise risk premia, although more recent failure resolution cases either had no effect on risk premia or moved them in the opposite direction. Several of these events consisted of no-action, that is, in particular, they did not entail any bail-in. As opposed to resolution actions, the reactions of risk premia to policy and regulatory announcements are more difficult to explain and no clear pattern seems to be emerging, confirming the view that action speaks louder than words.

Rising property prices are one explanation for higher prepayments of commercial mortgages as borrowers refinance to take out equity or sell their assets. However, prices may be driven not only by fundamentals but also investor irrationality. We investigate the informative value of investor sentiment for prepayments of loans underlying commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS). We employ Cox Proportional Hazard models to analyze a sample of 10,728 multifamily securitized loans for the period of 2001 to 2015. We find that, controlling for fundamentals, interest rates and loan characteristics, irrational investor sentiment can explain the exercise of the prepayment option by fixed- and floating-rate borrowers in times of increased property prices. The effect of irrational sentiment on prepayment hazard is robust to different sentiment measures as well as originator, geographic, and deal characteristics. Our findings suggest that irrational investor sentiment is a source of information for lenders and CMBS investors interested in predicting prepayments.