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...

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 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...

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,...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

This paper studies high-frequency econometric methods to test for a jump in the spread of bond yields. We propose a coherent inference procedure that detects a jump in the yield spread only if at least one of the two underlying bonds displays a jump. Ignoring this inherent connection by basing...