This paper investigates features of credit risk using non-parametric techniques, studying determinants of risk premia using a non-parametric term-structure model of the corporate spread. The model, which measures the extra return of defaultable corporate bonds on their government counterparts,...

The illiquidity of long-maturity options has made it difficult to study the term structures of option spanning portfolios. This paper proposes a new estimation and inference framework for these option-implied term structures that addresses long-maturity illiquidity. By building a sieve estimator...

We study the determinants of sovereign bond yield spreads across 10 EMU countries between Q1/1999 and Q1/2010. We apply a semiparametric time-varying coefficient model to identify, to what extent an observed change in the yield spread is due to a shift in macroeconomic fundamentals or due to...

The current European Debt Crisis has led to a reinforced effort to identify the sources of risk and their influence on yields of European Government Bonds. Until now, the potentially nonlinear influence and the theoretical need for interactions reflecting flighttoquality and flight-to-liquidity...

We study the determinants of sovereign bond yield spreads across 10 EMU countries between Q1/1999 and Q1/2010. We apply a semiparametric time-varying coefficient model to identify, to what extent an observed change in the yield spread is due to a shift in macroeconomic fundamentals or due to...

In this paper we introduce the Extended Method of Moments (XMM) estimator. This estimator accommodates a more general set of moment restrictions than the standard Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator. More specifically, the XMM differs from the GMM in that it can handle not only uniform...

We consider time series models in which the conditional mean of the response variable given the past depends on latent covariates. We assume that the covariates can be estimated consistently and use an iterative nonparametric kernel smoothing procedure for estimating the conditional mean...

Implicit in interest rate derivatives are Arrow-Debreu prices (or state price densities, SPDs) that contain fundamental information for risk and portfolio management in interest rate markets. To extract such information from interest rate derivatives, we propose a non-parametric method to...

We analyze the US Corporate Investment Grade (IG) credit risk premium, as represented by the average excess return of US corporate IG bonds over duration-matched US Treasuries. Over the period January 1973 through April 2018, this credit excess return averaged 60 bps p.a. (implying a stand-alone...

The relation between idiosyncratic risk and stock returns is currently a topic of debate in the academic literature. So far the evidence regarding the relation is mixed. This study aims to investigate the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic risk and stock returns in the Indian stock...