This paper investigates the market pricing of subprime mortgage risk on the basis of data forthe ABX.HE family of indices, which have become a key barometer of mortgage marketconditions during the recent financial crisis. After an introduction into ABX index mechanicsand a discussion of...

We estimate time-varying expected excess returns on the US stock market from 1983to 2008 using a model that jointly captures the arbitrage-free dynamics of stockreturns and nominal bond yields. The model nests the class of affine term structure (ofinterest rates) models. Stock returns and bond...

This paper investigates the potential impact of the growing influence of the opinions of credit rating agencies (CRAs) on market dynamics. This impact can be seen as a consequence of the information content of the ratings themselves or indirectly as a consequence of the "hardwiring" of ratings...

This paper studies market liquidity in interest rate swaps (IRS) before and during the global tightening of monetary policy. IRS constitute the single largest derivatives segment globally. Banks and Pension Funds extensively rely on IRS to hedge interest rate risk. Hence, providing an...

Term premia are shown to provide crucial information for discriminating among alternative sources of change in the economy, and namely shifts in the variance of structural shocks and in monetary policy. These sources have been identified as competing explanations for time-varying features of...

We decompose the squared VIX index, derived from US S&P500 options prices, into the conditional variance of stock returns and the equity variance premium. We evaluate a plethora of state-of-the-art volatility forecasting models to produce an accurate measure of the conditional variance. We then...

This study evaluates the macroeconomic effects of Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) announcements by the European Central Bank (ECB). Using high-frequency data, we find that OMT announcements decreased the Italian and Spanish 2-year government bond yields by about 2 percentage points, while...

This study investigates the dynamics of the sovereign CDS term premium for five European countries. The CDS term premium can be regarded as a forward-looking measure of idiosyncratic sovereign default risk as perceived by financial markets. Using a Markov-switching unobserved component model, we...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting atthe intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how thereaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance ofprivate information in agents’ information...