The authors revisit the case for maintaining a strategic overweight to corporate bonds in fixed income portfolios based on the notion of the credit risk premium. Using a series of excess returns to investment-grade corporate bonds going back to 1926, the authors find evidence of a positive risk...

Higher default probabilities are associated with lower future stock returns. The anomaly cannot be explained by strategic shareholder actions, traditional risk factors, characteristics, or mispricing, but, instead, is consistent with a risk-shifting hypothesis. Consistent with the risk-shifting...

We investigate the link between momentum returns, credit ratings, and business cycles. Momentum returns are significant and large in speculative-grade stocks and more so during contraction periods in business cycles. Speculative-grade stocks, on average earn momentum returns of 1.71% per month...

Diversification benefits depend on the correlation between assets. Unfortunately, asset correlation increases when it is most needed. We examine bond correlation using a broad sample of US corporate bonds. We find bond correlation to be higher during the financial crisis in 2008. Increased bond...

Recent policy discussion includes the introduction of diversification requirements for sovereign bond portfolios of European banks. In this paper, we evaluate the possible effects of these constraints on risk and diversification in the sovereign bond portfolios of the major European banks....

Recent policy discussion includes the introduction of diversification requirements for sovereign bond portfolios of European banks. In this paper, we evaluate the possible effects of these constraints on risk and diversification in the sovereign bond portfolios of the major European banks....

We discuss risk measures representing the minimum amount of capital a financial institution needs to raise and invest in a pre-specified eligible asset to ensure it is adequately capitalized. Most of the literature has focused on cash-additive risk measures, for which the eligible asset is a...

We study capital requirements for bounded financial positions defined as the minimum amount of capital to invest in a chosen eligible asset targeting a pre-specified acceptability test. We allow for general acceptance sets and general eligible assets, including defaultable bonds. Since the...

With the recent development of the European debt crisis, traditional index bond management has been severely called into question. We focus here on the risk issues raised by the classical market-capitalization weighting scheme. We propose an approach to properly measure sovereign credit risk in...

In this paper, we apply the principle of Equal Risk Contribution (ERC) to a corporate bond index, an asset class so far left behind in this literature. Specifically, we rely on the Duration Times Spread (DTS) and demonstrate that it is a coherent metric for bond risk. We construct indexes based...