Stock markets play a dual role: they provide information about firms’ fundamentals, which improves resource allocations, and they provide liquidity. We propose a setting in which these two roles interact: if stocks are used more intensively for liquidity, then prices reveal less information about fundamentals. We structurally estimate stock price informativeness for several countries and show that it declines when alternative liquidity sources, such as banks, are in distress. To study the real effects of this mechanism, we devise a strategy to integrate our stock-trading module into a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. We calibrate the model to the United States and simulate recessions with and without banking distress. In a standalone recession, prices become more informative and allocation improves, mitigating output losses by 4.4%. If the recession coincides with banking distress, agents rely more on stock markets to obtain liquidity, prices become less informative, and allocation deteriorates, magnifying output losses by 22%.

This paper estimates the global network structure of sovereign credit risk by applying the Diebold-Yilmaz connectedness methodology on sovereign credit default swaps (SCDSs). The level of credit risk connectedness among sovereigns, which is quite high, is comparable to the connectedness among stock markets and foreign exchange markets. In the aftermath of the recent financial crises that originated in developed countries, emerging market countries have played a crucial role in the transmission of sovereign credit risk, while developed countries and debt-ridden developing countries have played marginal roles. Secondary regressions show that both trade and capital flows are important determinants of pairwise connectedness across countries. The capital flows became increasingly important after 2013, while the effect of trade flows decreased during the crisis and did not recover afterwards.