State-contingent government debt has been proposed as a way to reduce costly debt crisis. However, markets for this type of debt remain very limited, for reasons that are not yet fully understood. This paper describes a new database covering state-contingent government debt issued between 1863...

Bond prices from 1897 to 1926 have not been compiled. Financial historians have made do with yield series offered by Macaulay (1938) or with yield summaries found in Durand (1942), Hickman (1958), or Homer (1963). Where holding period returns have been of interest (Siegel 2014), these have been...

We analyze how secession movements unfold and the interdependence of regions' decisions to secede. We first model and then empirically examine how secessions can occur sequentially because the costs of secession decrease with the number of seceders and because regions update their decisions...

We hand-collect new data on municipal bonds issued by all states and the largest 100 cities in the U.S. between 1920 and 2020 and study how the terms of municipal bond financing evolved over the last century. We document a striking decline of almost 50% in the maturity of these bonds. We analyze...

We gather the most comprehensive database of government bonds for the first globalisation era to date to conduct the first historically informed study of the importance of liquidity for colonial and sovereign yield spreads. Considering both liquidity and credit shows that the two markets were...

In the repo market, forward agreements are security-specific (i.e., there are no deliverable substitutes), which makes it an ideal place to measure the value of fluctuations in a security's available supply. In this study, we quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the...

We can only estimate the distribution of stock returns but from option prices we observe the distribution of state prices. State prices are the product of risk aversion – the pricing kernel – and the natural probability distribution. The Recovery Theorem enables us to separate these so as to...

In the repo market, forward agreements are security-specific (i.e., there are no deliverable substitutes), which makes it an ideal place to measure the value of fluctuations in a security's available supply. In this study, we quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the...

This article focuses on the asset price volatility at the stock exchange that result from the regime switching behaviour in the market. This study is devoted to the question about how the asset price volatility affects the US sovereign debt market. The efficient market hypothesis has been a base...

Security indices are central to modern finance. Because corporate bonds trade infrequently – often less than once a month – corporate bond indices cannot rely exclusively on real time prices, and must instead estimate the value of the market portfolio. While commercial indices do this using...