This paper studies the determinants of interest rate spreads of euro area 10 year government bonds against the benchmark, the German bund, after the introduction of the euro. In particular, it pays attention to the question whether market discipline is advanced or obstructed by financial...

This study calibrates the term structure of risk premia before and during the 2007/2008 financial crisis using a new calibration approach based on credit default swaps. The risk premium term structure was flat before the crisis and downward sloping during the crisis. The instantaneous risk...

The credit valuation adjustment (CVA) of OTC derivatives is an important part of the Basel III credit risk capital requirements and current accounting rules. Its calculation is not an easy task - not only it is necessary to model the future value of the derivative, but also the probability of...

Basic purpose of a credit default swap (CDS) is to protect its buyer against a default of a reference entity. During the ongoing EMU debt crisis this purpose was questioned when Greek default was postponed continuously and actions of European public authorities gave rise to speculations that...

A company can go bankrupt if the value of its assets drops below the debt level. This event can happen at any point in time. This is however not taken into account in the plain vanilla option framework of the Merton model. Theoretically, the barrier version of the Merton model shall therefore be...

This paper quantifies liquidity and credit premia in German and French government bond yields. For this purpose, we estimate term structures of government-guaranteed agency bonds and exploit the fact that any difference in their yields vis-`a-vis government bonds can be attributed to differences...

This paper proposes a set of indicators relevant for the risk characteristics of covered bonds, as based on granular publicly available transparency data. The indicators capture various aspects of cash flow risks related to the issuer, the cover pool and the payment structure. They offer unified...

Credit spreads may be jointly driven by developments that are orthogonal to the current state of the economy. We show that this unobserved systematic component is demanded to hedge against adverse economic fluctuations. Using either yield-to-maturity spreads or asset swap spreads for 2345...