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...

Focussing on repo specialness premia, using ISIN-specific transaction-by-transaction data of one-day maturity repos, we document a gradual shift from cash- to securities-driven transactions in euro area repo markets over the period 2010-2018. Compared to earlier studies focussing only on...

We assess the impact of the corporate sector purchase programme (CSPP), the corporate arm of the ECB's quantitative easing, over its first year of activity (June 2016 - June 2017). Focusing on the primary bond market, we find evidence of a significant impact of the CSPP on yield spreads, both...

Euro area governments have committed to break the doom loop between banks and sovereigns. But policymakers disagree on how to treat sovereign exposures in bank regulation. Our contribution is to model endogenous sovereign portfolio reallocation by banks in response to regulatory reform....

We assess the effect and the timing of the corporate arm of the ECB quantitative easing (CSPP) on corporate bond issuance. Because of several contemporaneous measures, to isolate the programme effects we rely on one key eligibility feature: the euro denomination of newly issued bonds. We find...