We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that arepoorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but havestrong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global fac-tors are jointly signicant predictors of bond returns, where...

This paper introduces an expected value estimator with expert knowledge to the robust estimation of sovereign rating transitions which are characterised by few observations. Ourestimates of default premia within Mexican, Colombian and Brazilian Eurobond yield spreads provide a better fit than...

Due to their underlying assumptions, the standard concepts of risk aversion and preference for the present are generally defined separately and represented by scalar measures, and this implies many shortcomings. More specifically, if measured by a scalar, the risk aversion remains unchanged,...

Credit Default Swaps (CDS) are in the process of becoming, liquid and extremelyinformative instruments of default risk. Yet, default swap market has severalnovel aspects that have not received much attention. In this paper we studyan aspect of CDS´s that relates to the prediction of financial...

CEO compensation has increased substantially over the past 15 years, but so has forcedturnover. Motivated by this observation, we investigate whether part of the developmentof CEO pay can be explained by a premium which compensates CEOs for increased job risk.We ¯nd that for the CEOs of the...

We study the pricing of political uncertainty in a general equilibrium model of government policy choice. We find that political uncertainty commands a risk premium whose magnitude is larger in poorer economic conditions. Political uncertainty reduces the value of the implicit put protection...

This paper proposes a panel data approach to modeling the risk premium in the term structure of interest rates. Specifically, we develop a fixed maturity/random time effects model that implies a time-invariant one-factor model. Our approach allows us to disentangle risk premia and unexpected...

A popular suggestion among emerging or transition economies is to 'dollarize' or 'euro-ize'; that is to adopt the currency of a larger, richer neighbour in order to import the monetary discipline and financial stability of that neighbour. This paper examines the pros and cons of that suggestion...

A single variable describes, day-by-day, what investors think about the state of Brazil's economy: the Brazilian component of the Emerging Market Bond Index, the Embi spread. This spread is the difference between the yield on a dollar-denominated bond issued by the Brazilian government and a...