We provide new estimates of the return on US external claims and liabilities using confidential, high-quality, security-level data. The excess return is positive on average, since claims are tilted toward higher return equities. The excess return is large and positive in normal times but large...

Intro -- Contents -- I. Introduction -- II. Household Data on Wealth and Consumption -- III. Capital Markets in Europe and Household Portfolios -- IV. The Life-Cycle Model of Consumption -- V. The Basic Model -- VI. Empirical Results -- VII. Conclusion -- Appendix: Data and Constructed Variables...

This paper proposes a novel shrinkage estimator for high-dimensional covariance matrices by extending the Oracle Approximating Shrinkage (OAS) of Chen et al. (2009) to target the diagonal elements of the sample covariance matrix. We derive the closed-form solution of the shrinkage parameter and...

The paper analyzes and quantifies the importance of sovereign risk in determining corporate default premia (yield spreads). It also investigates the extent to which the practice by rating agencies and banks of not rating companies higher than their sovereign ("country or sovereign ceiling") is...

This paper examines equilibrium price relationships and price discovery between credit defaul swap (CDS), bond, and equity markets for emerging market sovereign issuers. Findings suggest that CDS and bond spreads converge despite various pressures that arise in the market. In most countries,...

This paper presents some conventional and new measures of market, credit, and liquidity risks for government bonds. These measures are analyzed from the perspective of a sovereign's debt manager. In particular, it examines duration, convexity, M-square, skewness, kurtosis, and VaR statistics as...

This paper proposes a new definition of Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) and develops a statistical method to differentiate between OFCs and non-OFCs using data from the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS), the International Investment Position (IIP), and the balance of payments. The...