We study the role of sovereign debt for equity returns in the Covid-19 pandemic. Using individual stock-level data of more than 25,000 firms in more than 80 countries, we exploit variation in debt-to-GDP in narrowly defined industries and geographical regions. Following the outbreak of the...

The biggest and most well-known unsolved problem in academic finance is famously referred to as the Equity Premium Puzzle. It refers to the unexplained phenomenon that for over 100 years the average return on a well-diversified portfolio of equities has far outperformed that of risk-free,...

Expectations of risky bond payments are unobservable and recovery rates for sovereigns are hard to estimate because they have no contractual claims to defined assets and samples of defaults are limited. A geometric version of credit spread is used to derive expected payments, dependent on...

This note looks at US$ and DM/Euro denominated government bond spreads relative to US and German benchmark bonds before and after the start of the current financial crisis. The study finds, first, that bond yield spreads before and during the crisis can largely be explained on the basis of...

Sovereign debt restructurings are perceived as inflicting large losses to bondholders.However, many bonds feature high coupons and often exhibit strong post-crisis recoveries. To account for these aspects, we analyze the long-term returns of sovereign bonds during 32 crises since 1998, taking...

Empirical research on the benefits of investing in inflation-linked bonds usually relies on a limited number of observations due to the relatively recent introduction of these assets. We estimate models for the break-even inflation rate and use these to create hypothetical inflation-linked bond...

Using an international dataset, this paper documents a negative association between increases in the central government debt-to-GDP ratio and dollar-denominated stock index returns. Depending on the estimation method, raising the debt ratio by one percentage point diminishes the stock returns by...

This paper relates Keynes’s discussions of money, the state theory of money, financial markets, investors’ expectations, uncertainty, and liquidity preference to the dynamics of government bond yields for countries with monetary sovereignty. Keynes argued that the central bank can influence...

Supported by empirical examples, this paper provides a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set for the estimation of the empirical pricing kernel and, more in general, for the validity of the fundamental theorems of asset pricing. While inferring the...

The use of futures exchange contracts instead of forwards completes the maturity spectrum of the correlation between the spot yield and the premium. We find that the forward premium puzzle (FFP) depends significantly on the maturity horizon of the futures contract and the choice of sampling...