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...

We show that liquidity tail risk in credit default swap (CDS) spreads is time-varying and explains variation in CDS spreads. We capture the liquidity tail risk of a CDS contract written on a firm by estimating the tail dependence, i.e., the asymptotic probability of a joint surge in the bid-ask...

The paper considers a no-arbitrage setting for pricing and relative value analysis of risky sovereign bonds. The typical case of an emerging market country (EM) that has bonds outstanding both in foreign hard currency (Eurobonds) and local soft currency (treasuries) is inspected. The resulting...

In this paper, I analyze credit risk premia embedded in sovereign CDS spreads. In particular, I consider a heretofore largely ignored component that reflects the compensation investors demand for default event risk. I find that this default event risk premium is most heavily priced in short...

The paper investigates the risky sovereign spreads and the CDS-Bond basis of a country following a fixed exchange rate under a Currency Board Arrangement (CBA). The particular monetary regime affects significantly the mechanics of the bond market and needs a special investigation. We start by...

This paper studies the behavior of corporate bond spreads during different market regimes between 2004 and 2016. Applying a Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MS-VAR) model, we document that the dynamic impact of spread determinants varies substantially with market conditions. In periods of...

Exploiting information contained in the term-structure of sovereign credit spreads, we estimate time-varying fiscal limits – defined as the maximum outstanding debt that can credibly be covered by future primary budget surpluses. Our approach is based on a novel sovereign credit risk model...

The run-up to the Greek default featured marked increases in the cost of insuring sovereign debt from almost all European countries. One explanation is that market participants believed a default in one country might increase the risk of a future default in another, and so news about one country...