In this paper, we present a new approach to measuring interest rate risk for insurers within the Swiss Solvency Test, which overcomes the shortcomings of the standard model. The standard model of the Swiss Solvency Test is based on more interest rate risk factors than are actually needed to...

Affine term structure models of bond yields are important tools for analyzing fixed income markets and monetary policy. Estimators of Adrian, Crump, and Mönch (2013) and Diez de Los Rios (2015) replace time-consuming nonlinear search procedures with a set of simple linear regressions. However,...

In der vorliegenden Arbeit untersuchen wir die Eignung der ifo-Geschäftserwartungen und der ZEW-Konjunkturerwartungen als Frühindikatoren für die deutsche Industrieproduktion. Anhand von Granger-Kausalitätstests wird gezeigt, dass die auf Umfragen unter Finanzanalysten basierenden...

We analyze four economic sentiment indicators for the German economy regarding their ability to forecast economic activity. Using cross correlations and Granger causality tests we find that the ifo business expectations (ifo), the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) and the ZEW Indicator of Economic...

This paper studies the behavior of corporate bond spreads during different market regimes between 2004 and 2016. Applying a Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MS-VAR) model, we document that the dynamic impact of spread determinants varies substantially with market conditions. In periods of...

We investigate the e ect of monetary policy on European macroeconomic variables using a small-scale vector autoregression (VAR) and the "Effective Monetary Stimulus" (EMS). The EMS is a monetary policy metric obtained from yield curve data that is designed to consistently reflect the overall...

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...

I propose a new term structure model for euro area real and nominal interest rates which explicitly incorporates a time-varying lower bound for nominal interest rates. Results suggest that the lower bound is of importance in structural analyses implying time-varying impulse responses of yield...