This paper investigates the power of macroeconomic factors to explain euro area bond risk premia using (i) a big dataset (ii) the Elastic Net variable selection. We find that macroeconomic factors, in particular economic activity and sentiment indicators, explain 40% of the variability of risk...

This paper investigates the power of macroeconomic factors to explain euro area bond risk premia using (i) a large dataset that captures the nowadays data-rich environment (ii) the Elastic Net variable selection. We find that macroeconomic factors, in particular economic activity and sentiment...