We study the information flow from the ECB on policy dates since its inception, using tick data. We show that three factors capture about all of the variation in the yield curve but that these are different factors with different variance shares in the window that contains the policy decision...

We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we analyse financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on two...

This study extends standard C-CAPM by including two additional factors related to firm size (SMB) and book-to-market value ratio (HML) – the Fama-French factors. CCAPM is least able to price firms with low book-to-market ratios. The explanation of these returns, as well as the returns on the...

The term structure of interest rates does not adhere to the expectations hypothesis, possibly due to a risk premium. We consider the implications of a risk premium that arises from endogenous market segmentation driven by variable inflation rates. In the absence of autocorrelation in inflation,...

The optimal investment to mitigate climate change crucially depends on the discount rate used to evaluate the investment’s uncertain future benefits. The appropriate discount rate is a function of the horizon over which these benefits accrue and the riskiness of the investment. In this paper,...

One of the leading criticisms of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is the presence of so-called “anomalies”, i.e. empirical evidence of abnormal behaviour of asset prices which is inconsistent with market efficiency. However, most studies do not take into account transaction costs. Their...

This paper analyses the determinants and effects of ECB interventions in times of severe distress. We focus on the Greek government bond market in mid-2010 and use a unique new dataset to show, for the first time, what type of bonds the ECB bought. We then explore the short-term effects of ECB...

We construct a slope factor from changes in federal funds futures of different horizons. Slope predicts stock returns at the weekly frequency: faster monetary policy easing positively predicts excess returns. Investors can achieve increases in weekly Sharpe ratios of 20% conditioning on the...

During Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis, interest rate spreads have been highly correlated with the share of multilateral loans that were considered senior to private markets. As both variables are potentially endogenous, we follow two different approaches to analyze the direction of causality....