The asset value of government has traditionally been seen as the accounting value of public assets. We develop a detailed financial economics view on sovereign asset values using market measures to arrive at implied sovereign asset values. We establish definition and dependencies within the...

Net corporate profits have persisted at historical highs for almost 10 years. Such levels exceed what can be profitably re-invested, as evidenced by aggregate dividend payouts and buybacks nearing 6% of GDP. We argue that at such levels corporate profits operate effectively as a tax on the...

This paper investigates whether the price response to credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on sovereign bonds has diminished since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We characterize credit rating events more precisely than previous work, controlling agency announcements for the prior credit...

The paper analyses the drivers of sovereign risk for 31 advanced and emerging economies during the European sovereign debt crisis. It shows that a deterioration in countries' fundamentals and fundamentals contagion – a sharp rise in the sensitivity of financial markets to fundamentals – are...

Using an international dataset, this paper documents a negative association between increases in the central government debt-to-GDP ratio and dollar-denominated stock index returns. Depending on the estimation method, raising the debt ratio by one percentage point diminishes the stock returns by...

The rise and subsequent collapse of US house prices was one of the factors underlying the recent financial crisis. One could expect that the crisis brought increased attention to the housing market and thus led to stronger market reactions to house price news. We find that reactions indeed...

The impact of U.S. bank loan announcements on the stock prices of the corporate borrowers has been decreasing during the two last decades with estimated two-day cumulative abnormal returns slipping from almost 200 basis points in the beginning of the 1980s to close to zero by the turn of the...

This paper examines the influence of Spanish major political events on stock market performance by testing the empirical implications of the existing theories focused on the connection between politics and stock exchanges. On the one hand, our findings give support to the partisan politics...

Banks play a special role as providers of informative signals about the quality and value of their borrowers. Such signals, however, may have a quality of their own as the banks' selection and monitoring abilities may differ. Using an event study methodology, we study the importance of the...

The paper examines the applicability of GDP-linked bonds for the financing of developing countries and emerging markets. GDP-linked bonds are bonds of which the coupon and/or redemption payments are tied to the GDP of the issuing country. The study encompasses a detailed empirical analysis of...