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...

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...

Volatility in Italian sovereign spreads has increased since mid-2011. This paper finds that news on the euro area debt crisis and country specific events were important drivers of sovereign spreads. Movements in sovereign spreads affect CDS spreads and bond yields of Italian banks, and are...

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...

This paper examines the association between the default risk of foreign bank subsidiaries in developing countries and their parents during the global financial crisis, with the purpose of determining the size and sign of this correlation and, more importantly, understanding what factors can help...

Assessing default risks for Chinese firms is hard. Standard measures of risk using market indicators may be unreliable because of implicit guarantees, the large role played by less-informed investors, and other market imperfections. We test this assertion by estimating stand-alone 1-year default...