We show that excess returns to the carry trade can be interpreted as compensation for foreign exchange dealers' capital risk. Given that the top market makers in foreign exchange are at the heart of the market's information aggregation process we also suggest that it is their marginal value of...

Many assets derive their value not only from future cash flows but also from their ability to serve as collateral. In this paper, we investigate this collateral value and its impact on asset returns in an infinite-horizon general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents facing collateral...

Broker-dealer leverage has recently proven to be strongly procyclical, exhibiting impressive explanatory power for a large cross-section of asset returns in the US. In this paper we add empirical evidence to this finding, showing that European and German broker-dealers actively manage their...

Cross-sectional asset pricing tests with GMM can generate spuriouslyhigh explanatory power for factor models when the moment conditions are specifiedsuch that they allow the estimated factor means to substantially deviate from theobserved sample averages. In fact, by shifting the weights on the...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

Bond excess returns can be predicted by macro factors, however, large parts remain still unexplained. We apply a novel term structure model to decompose bond excess returns into expected excess returns (risk premia) and the unexpected part. In order to explore these risk premia and innovations,...

We apply Bayesian Model Averaging and a frequentistic model space analysis to assess the pricing-determinants of credit default swaps (CDS). Our study focuses on the complete model space of plausible models covering most of the variables and specifications used elsewhere in the literature,...

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...

Using arbitrage-free affine models, we analyze the dynamics of German bond yields and risk premia for the period 1999 to 2010 (EMU). We estimate two model specifications, one with only latent factors, and another one with a Taylor-type rule comprising a price and a real activity factor drawn...

In a parsimonious regime switching model, expected consumption growth varies over time. Adding in ation as a conditioning variable, we uncover two states in which expected consumption growth is low, one with high and one with negative expected in ation. Embedded in a general equilibrium asset...