We look at the Risk-Free Rate (RF) and the Market Risk Premium (MRP) used by analysts in 2015 to value companies of six countries. The dispersion of both, the RF and the MRP used, is huge, and the most unexpected result is that the dispersion is higher for the RF than for the MRP.We also find...

Despite the single currency, yields on government bonds in the Euro Area deviate from German bond yields. These bond spreads are usually attributed to differing default and liquidity risks. Recent research points out that time-varying global factors, approximated by risk measures or short term...

This paper studies the behavior of sovereign spreads of countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and their apparent disconnection with country-specific fundamentals before the 2008- 2013 debt crisis. We test three characteristics of spreads: i) a change in the level of spreads, ii) a weak...

This paper provides a study of bond yield differentials among EU eurobonds issued between 1991 and 2002. Interest differentials between bonds issued by EU countries and Germany or the USA contain risk premia which increase with the debt, deficit and debt-service ratio and depend positively on...

We derive a model in which a standard international capital asset pricing (ICAPM) model is nested within an ICAPM model with market imperfections. In the latter model an idiosyncratic stochastic factor affects the return of risky assets (over a risk-free rate) on top of the systematic component...

The current European Debt Crisis has led to a reinforced effort to identify the sources of risk and their influence on yields of European Government Bonds. Until now, the potentially nonlinear influence and the theoretical need for interactions reflecting flighttoquality and flight-to-liquidity...

There is a growing empirical literature studying whether fiscal rules reduce borrowing costs. Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether these rules are effective genuinely or just because they mirror fiscal preferences of politicians and voters. In our analysis of European bond spreads,...

We study self- and cross-excitation of shocks in the Eurozone sovereign CDS market. We adopt a multivariate setting with credit default intensities driven by mutually exciting jump processes, to capture the salient features observed in the data, in particular, the clustering of high default...

There is a growing empirical literature studying whether fiscal rules reduce borrowing costs. Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether these rules are effective genuinely or just because they mirror fiscal preferences of politicians and voters. In our analysis of European bond spreads,...

We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we make use of financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on...