Lack of shareholders' commitment about debt and investment policies increases the cost of debt by a quantity that we refer to as the agency (credit) spread. The agency spread increases with the number of periods for which debt holders are exposed to policies that decrease the value of debt: from...

In this paper, we empirically explore risk premia in mortgage covered bond markets. Using a large panel data set of covered bond asset swap spreads, we study the impact of different legal and economic environments. Conducting an in-depth analysis of this market, we find significant but small...

In this paper, we examine the temporal stability of the evidence for two commodity futures pricing theories. We investigate whether the forecast power of commodity futures can be attributed to the extent to which they exhibit seasonality and we also consider whether there are time varying...

In this paper, we study the role of the volatility risk premium for the forecasting performance of implied volatility. We introduce a non-parametric and parsimonious approach to adjust the model-free implied volatility for the volatility risk premium and implement this methodology using more...

By studying 81 countries over a period of up to 144 years, with different classes of predictor variables and various forecast specifications, we conduct the most comprehensive equity premium predictability analysis to date. We find that excess returns are more predictable in Emerging and...