This paper investigates the impact of credit rating changes on the sovereign spreads in the European Union and investigates the macro and financial factors that account for the time varying effects of a given credit rating change. We find that changes of ratings are informative, economically...

We can only estimate the distribution of stock returns but we observe the distribution of risk neutral state prices. Risk neutral state prices are the product of risk aversion - the pricing kernel - and the natural probability distribution. The Recovery Theorem enables us to separate these and...

We empirically assess the relative importance of various economic fundamentals in accounting for the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads of emerging markets during 2004-2012, which encompasses the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. Inflation, state fragility, external debt, and...

We examine whether there is a flight-to-liquidity premium in Treasury bond prices by comparing them with prices of bonds issued by Refcorp, a U.S. Government agency, which are guaranteed by the Treasury. We find a large liquidity premium in Treasury bonds, which can be more than fifteen percent...

This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. We compile a new database of 220,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering 91 countries. Our main insight is that, as in equity...

Banks' balance-sheet exposure to fluctuations in interest rates strongly forecasts excess Treasury bond returns. This result is consistent with optimal risk management, a banking counterpart to the household Euler equation. In equilibrium, the bond risk premium compensates banks for bearing...

Asset prices contain information about the probability distribution of future states and the stochastic discounting of these states. Without additional assumptions, probabilities and stochastic discounting cannot be separately identified. Ross (2013) introduced a set of assumptions that restrict...

Our new model of consumption-based habit formation preferences generates loglinear, homoskedastic macroeconomic dynamics and time-varying risk premia on bonds and stocks. Consumers' first-order condition for the real risk-free interest rate takes the form of an exactly loglinear consumption...

Is the pricing of sovereign risk linear during bearish episodes? Or can initial shocks on economic fundamentals be exacerbated by endogenous factors that create nonlinearities? We test for nonlinearities in the sovereign bond market of European peripheral countries during the debt crisis and...

We quantify the difference in the convenience yield of U.S. Treasuries and the bonds of near default-free sovereigns by measuring the gap between the FX swap-implied dollar yield paid by foreign governments and the U.S. Treasury dollar yield. We call this wedge the “U.S. Treasury Premium.”...