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...

This paper analyzes the market microstructure of the European Climate Exchange, the largest EU ETS trading venue. The ECX captures 2/3 of the screen traded market in EUA and more than 90% in CER. Trading volumes are active, with EUA volume doubling in 2009. Spreads range from €0.02 to €0.06...

We tackle two questions in this paper: In the sovereign debt crisis, what moves the euro area inflation outlook and has the firm anchoring of medium to long-term inflation expectations been touched? Deriving densities from a new data set on options on the euro area harmonized index of consumer...

This paper investigates the variance risk premium in an international setting. First, I provide new evidence on the basic stylized facts traditionally documented for the US. I show that while the variance premiums in several countries are, on average, positive and display significant time...

This paper measures the connectedness in European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) sovereign and bank CDS between April 2008 and December 2014, in order to understand the transmission of stress during the euro crisis. To this end, we perform a connectedness analysis using the framework proposed...

We assess the integration dynamics on the European carbon futures market at both the intraday and daily levels. We focus on EUA futures contracts that can be traded on three trading platforms: the Intercontinental-European Climate Exchange (ICE-ECX), the NASDAQ OMX (formerly Nord Pool) and the...

The equity variance risk premium is the expected compensation earned for selling variance risk in equity markets. The variance risk premium is positive and shows moderate persistence. High variance risk premiums coincide with the left tail of the consumption growth distribution shifting down....

We estimate inflation risk-neutral densities (RNDs) in the Euro area since 2009. We use Euro inflation swaps and caps/floors options, and introduce a simple and parsimonious approach to jointly estimate the RNDs across horizons. This way, we obtain the implicit RND for forward measures, like the...

German government bonds are very popular among investors because of their liquidity and safety, and they are also widely used in repo transactions as collateral. During the recent financial crisis the excess demand for German securities pushed their yields below the theoretical risk-free rate....

In the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008 and over the course of the European debt crisis, the ECB announced a number of unconventional monetary policy implementations with the aim of restoring confidence in the functioning of the European financial system. This paper studies the effect...