Recent policy discussion includes the introduction of diversification requirements for sovereign bond portfolios of European banks. In this paper, we evaluate the possible effects of these constraints on risk and diversification in the sovereign bond portfolios of the major European banks....

The notable increase in international reserve holdings over the past decade and their use during the global financial crisis of 2008/2009 has sparked renewed interest in the analysis of the optimal level of reserve holdings, in particular in countries which are subject to sudden stops. Less...

We investigate the risk of holding credit default swaps (CDS) in the trading book and compare the Value at Risk (VaR) of a CDS position to the VaR for investing in the respective firm's equity using a sample of CDS stock price pairs for 86 actively traded firms over the period from March 2003 to...

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the demand for safe government debt to currency unhedged and hedged excess returns in a sample of US mutual funds. We find evidence of active rebalancing towards government bonds that offer relatively higher returns on an unhedged basis, in particular...

We study what makes government bonds a safe asset. Building on a sample of monthly changes in government bond yields in 40 advanced and emerging countries, we analyse the sensitivity of yields to country specific fundamentals interacted with changes in global risk (VIX). We find that inertia...