The measure of global risk aversion that we calculate is based on Sløk and Kennedy (2005). In
particular, five principal components were calculated from a set of monthly US and EU area high-grade
and high-yield corporate bonds. It is important to include lower-risk instruments (high-grade
corporate bonds) since, as noted above, a number of countries in our sample would fall into this
category.We also included the difference between the US S&P earnings/price ratio and the real 10-year
Treasury rate as a measure of risk to the economy.