The paper provides an analysis of the euro area money and bond markets and their infrastructure since the introduction of the euro. Significant development in terms of integration took place in both markets in general to a various degree for the different segments. However, there remain room for...

We analyse the extent to which prices in the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) and bond markets reflect the same information on credit risk in the context of the European Monetary Union. The empirical analysis is based on the theoretical equivalence relation that should hold between the CDS...

The growth of the European financial markets, together with the new, stricter regulations on the U.S. financial markets, has spurred a debate over the competitiveness of the U.S. financial markets. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by investigating the relative competitiveness of the...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

Public sector corruption affects economic and financial outcomes, such as GDP growth, foreign direct investment, and government funding costs. Less is known about the spillovers from perceptions of public sector corruption on the private sector corporate bond market. In this paper, we assess the...

In this paper we study financial integration in Europe by looking at the time-varying relative importance of country versus industry factors in the European corporate bond market. Using a unique dataset that is representative for the universe of actively quoted corporate bonds, we find that...

The main objective of this paper is to study whether the introduction of the euro had an impact on the degree of integration of European Government bond markets. We adopt the CAPM-based model of Bekaert and Harvey (1995) to compare, from the beginning of Monetary Union until June 2008, the...

I investigate the time variation in the integration of EU government bond markets. The integration is measured by the explanatory power of European factor portfolios for the individual bond markets for each year. The integration of the government bond markets is stronger for EMU than non-EMU...

The main objective of this paper is to study whether the introduction of the euro had an impact on the degree of integration of European Government bond markets. We adopt the CAPM-based model of Bekaert and Harvey (1995) to compare, from the beginning of Monetary Union until June 2008, the...

The likelihood of severe contractions in an asset's liquidity can feed back to the ex ante risks faced by the individual providers of such liquidity. These self-reinforcing effects can spread to other assets through informational externalities and hedging relations. We explore whether such...