The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteen German states (L¨ander) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of a capital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed income market for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals...

We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we make use of financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on...

This paper examines the pricing of bonds issued by states and local governments. I use three distinct, complementary approaches to decompose municipal bond spreads into default and liquidity components, finding that default risk accounts for 74% to 84% of the average municipal bond spread after...

This study examines the relationship between underwriter placement risk and market transaction prices using a sample of state general obligation bonds. We proxy underwriter placement risk using three variables: “when-issued” trades, underwriter syndicate size, and bond sale method....

The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteen German states (L¨ander) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of a capital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed income market for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals...

This study examines whether the financial health of municipal bond investors can affect the municipal bond yield by especially focusing on the liquidity component. We find that the deterioration of the financial health of bond investors widens the liquidity spread of municipal bonds, and this...

This paper focuses on risk premiums paid by central governments in Europe and sub-national governments in Germany, Spain, and Canada. With regard to the European governments, we are interested in how these premiums were affected by the introduction of the euro. Using data for bond yield spreads...

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...

In this paper, we contribute to the discussion of what determines country risk by arguing that an important explanatory factor is the impact that commodities have on the capacity to pay. We use a newly created data base with state-level fiscal and risk premium data for Brazil states between 1891...