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Globalization has brought larger spillovers of global risks across borders since the 2000s. Specifically, global policy risk has sharply increased due to policy uncertainty in major countries in the recent decade as are shown in the Brexit, the US‐China trade friction and the COVID‐19 pandemic. This paper empirically investigates effects of both global policy risk and global financial risk on macroeconomy and financial markets in eight major countries from January 1997 to June 2020. We employed a structural vector autoregressive framework to obtain interesting empirical results. First, global risks have recessionary effects on the macroeconomy, reducing production, deteriorating employment, lowering long‐term interest rates, depressing prices and reducing global trade. Second, global risks also have recessionary effects on financial markets, plunging stock prices, appreciating the safe‐haven currencies and depreciating the other currencies. Third, the macroeconomies and the financial markets respond to the global financial risk more significantly than the global policy risk. Fourth, the recessionary effects of global risks vary depending on countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose and estimate several models controlling for firm‐specific information, to examine the relation of macroeconomic variables with the probability of default of firms in the Eurozone. The novelty of our approach consists in capturing the informational value of macroeconomic factors on credit default prediction by using data from firms spanning 11 European countries; our panel data set covers 534 thousand firm‐year observations. The results we obtain confirm that macroeconomic information strengthens the accuracy of models forecasting credit default of non‐financial firms. With a negative effect on the probability of default, GDP growth stands out among the key macroeconomic predictors of default. Yet, we find compelling evidence that asymmetries exist within the Eurozone regarding the benign effects of GDP growth over credit risk; the reduction of the probability of default due to economic growth mostly occurs in economies more exposed to conditions of financial stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]