We use outages as natural experiments to study sovereign bond market functioning. When the euro area futures market goes down, trading activity on the cash market declines, liquidity evaporates, and transaction prices deviate from fundamental values. Tracing back this macro-level market...

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...

We study correlations between the risk-free rate and sovereign yields of ten euro area countries using smooth transition conditional correlation GARCH (STCC-GARCH) specifications, controlling for credit risk in mean and variance equations and conditioning non-linearly to liquidity risk....

This paper investigates to what extent yield spreads on bonds issued by sub-sovereign entities within federations are driven by bailout expectations and investors' risk appetite, as opposed to fundamental values related to default risk. The question is analysed both across and within federations...

We trace the impact of the ECB's asset purchase programme (APP) on the sovereign yield curve. Exploiting granular information on sectoral asset holdings and ECB asset purchases, we construct a novel measure of the “free-float of duration risk” borne by price-sensitive investors. We include...

This paper investigates the power of macroeconomic factors to explain euro area bond risk premia using (i) a large dataset that captures the nowadays data-rich environment (ii) the Elastic Net variable selection. We find that macroeconomic factors, in particular economic activity and sentiment...

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...

This paper computes time-varying indicators of the relative importance of different credit spread determinants, including rating, sector and country attribution as well as the coupon rate, maturity and liquidity on the basis of the comprehensive dataset of individual bonds. Additionally, it...

This paper analyses leading indicator properties of a broad set of credit spreads, compiled on the basis of information from both corporate bonds and bank loans for forecasting of real activity, unemployment, inflation and lending volumes in the euro area and in five major European economies. It...