This paper presents a new approach, based on the Merton model, to decomposing corporate bond spreads into the expected loss, bond risk premium and liquidity premium components. The approach focuses on establishing the bond risk premium using the equity risk premium and the hedge ratio, which are...

We investigate the effect of fiscal institutions such as the strength of the finance minister in the budget process and deficits on interest spreads contained in bond yields of the countries now belonging to the Eurozone. Deficits significantly increase risk premia measured by relative swap...

Assessments of investors' risk appetite/aversion stance via indicators often yields results which seem unsatisfactory (see e.g. Illing and Aaron (2005)). Understanding how such indicators work therefore seems essential for further improvements. The present paper seeks to contribute to this...

As, in Europe, many institutional reforms have been undertaken to establish an economic union, it can be expected that the relevance of borders has decreased over time. For the EU 15, we investigate the expected integration process of the market for corporate control - an illustrative market for...

We show that including distribution costs into a general equilibrium model of international portfolio choice contributes to explaining the 'home bias' in international equity investment. Our model is able to replicate observed investment positions for a wide range of parameter values, even if...

Foreign exchange rates and capital movements are expected to be closely related to each other as international capital markets become more and more integrated. To account for this fact we construct an index of real effective exchange rates as a weighted average of cross-country asset price...

This paper examines how the exposure of German parent banks to the disruptions on sale and repurchase markets (repo markets) during the financial crisis has affected their provision of funds to their foreign branches and subsidiaries via bank-internal capital markets. The collapse of the...

This paper uses sovereign CDS spread changes and their volatilities as a proxy for the informational efficiency of the sovereign markets and persistency of country risks. Specifically, we apply semi-parametric and parametric methods to the sovereign CDSs of 10 eurozone countries to test the...

This paper presents a new approach for analysing the recent development of EMU sovereign bond spreads. Based on a GARCH-in-mean model originally used in the exchange rate target zone literature, spreads are decomposed into a risk premium, an expected loss component and a liquidity premium....