The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteen German states (L¨ander) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of a capital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed income market for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals...

This paper looks at the dynamic price relationship between spreads in the corporate bond market and credit default swaps (CDS). It picks up where Blanco et al (2005) leave off but is focused on European credit markets. The study is based on companies listed in the iTraxx CDS index and thus on...

Recent empirical studies criticize the sluggish financial integration in the euro area and find that only interbank money markets are fully integrated so far. This paper studies the optimal regional and/or sectoral integration of financial systems given that integration is restricted to the...

Following Diamond (1997) and Fecht (2004) we use a model in which financial market access of households restrains the efficiency of the liquidity insurance that banks' deposit contracts provide to households that are subject to idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. But in contrast to these approaches...

This paper compares four forms of inter-regional financial risk sharing: (i) segmentation, (ii) integration trough the secured interbank market, (iii) integration trough the unsecured interbank market, (iv) integration of retail markets. The secured interbank market is an optimal risk-sharing...

Assessing the discriminative power of rating systems is an important question to banks and to regulators. In this article we analyze the Cumulative Accuracy Profile (CAP) and the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) which are both commonly used in practice. We give a test-theoretic...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

We build a model in which financial intermediaries provide insurance to households against a liquidity shock. Households can also invest directly on a financial market if they pay a cost. In equilibrium, the ability of intermediaries to share risk is constrained by the market. This can be...

We study the risk of holding credit default swaps (CDS) in the trading book. In particular, we compare the Value at Risk (VaR) of a CDS position to the VaR for investing in the respective firm's equity. Our sample consists of CDS – stock price pairs for 86 actively traded firms over the period...

This paper investigates the returns and flows of German money market funds before and during the liquidity crisis of 2007/2008. The main findings of this paper are: In liquid times money market funds enhanced their returns by investing in less liquid papers. By doing so they outperformed other...