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.