This paper investigates the scarcity effects of quantitative easing (QE) policies, drawing on intra-day transaction-level data for German government bonds, purchased under the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP) of the ECB/Eurosystem. This paper is the first to match high-frequency QE purchase...

Using sovereign debt data from 47 countries, we document that the third moment (skewness) of unemployment changes has a positive and significant relation with sovereign bond returns. Thus, while investors require risk premia for exposure to macroeconomic shocks (Campbell, 1996), we find that the...

In this paper, the focus lies on the way the German government spends, how it spends and what the connection between finance ministry and central bank is. The institutions involved in the process are identified and discussed. As a member of the Eurozone, Germany's national central bank is not...

This paper uses data on German government bond futures options to examine the behaviour of market expectations around monetary policy actions of the European Central Bank (ECB). In particular, this paper focuses on the asymmetries in bond market expectations, as measured by the skewness of...

We study the dynamics of sovereign risk spillovers from (and between) Spain and Italy, before and after the ECB's announcement of the OMT program. We identify domestic Italian and Spanish sovereign risk shocks through an intraday event study. The shocks are used as external instruments in...

Starting in summer 2014, markets began to build up expectations that the European Central Bank (ECB) would embark on large-scale sovereign bond purchases. The ECB's Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) was eventually announced on 22 January 2015 and purchases started in March. Both during the...