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...

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...

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...

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...