European countries have increased significantly their public debt since the Global Financial Crisis. The increasing trend and the high concentration of public debt in portfolios of financial institutions can lead to a financial turmoil we witnessed during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis....

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of trading in the sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) market, using weekly data for single-name sovereign CDS from October 2008 to September 2015. We describe the anatomy of the sovereign CDS market, derive a law of motion for gross...

The rapidly growing federal government debt has become a concern for policy makers and the public. Yet the U.S. government has seemingly unbounded access to credit at low interest rates. Historically, Treasury yields have been below the growth rate of the economy. The paper examines the...

What will happen if Italy is not able to implement structural reforms and if international institutions, such as the EFSF and the IMF, do not intervene with sufficient resources to prevent Europe's second-largest economy from defaulting on its debt? The potential costs of such a scenario are, as...

The rapidly growing federal government debt has become a concern for policy makers and the public. Yet the U.S. government has seemingly unbounded access to credit at low interest rates. Historically, Treasury yields have been below the growth rate of the economy. The paper examines the...

The interdependencies of sovereign and banking sector credit spreads have been the subject of previous research. Since the 2007-2009 financial crisis the topic has an additional dimension as the size and structure of countries' balance sheets have changed due to various financial sector...