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...

In this paper we propose a generalisation of the noise trader transmission mechanism to examine the impact of central bank intervention on exchange rates. Within a heterogeneous expectations exchange rate model intervention operations are supposed to provide support to either chartist or...

We identify investor moral hazard in the German fiscal federation. Our identification strategy is based on a variable, which was used by the German Federal Constitutional Court as an indicator to determine eligibility of two German states (Länder) to a bail-out, the interest payments-to-revenue...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper we propose exact likelihood-based mean-variance efficiency tests of the market portfolio in the context of Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), allowing for a wide class of error distributions which include normality as a special case. These tests are developed in the framework of...

In recent years, a number of papers have established a new empirical regularity. Stocks of distressed firms vastly underperform those of financially healthy firms. It is not necessary to attribute the negative excess returns of distressed firms to inefficient or irrational markets. We show that...

The flow of information between futures and spot prices may vary over time, in particular during periods of stress. This article analyses the information content of the Bund Future and German government bonds during 1998 and test whether it is constant over time. The use of high-frequency data...