Expectations of risky bond payments are unobservable and recovery rates for sovereigns are hard to estimate because they have no contractual claims to defined assets and samples of defaults are limited. A geometric version of credit spread is used to derive expected payments, dependent on...

The biggest and most well-known unsolved problem in academic finance is famously referred to as the Equity Premium Puzzle. It refers to the unexplained phenomenon that for over 100 years the average return on a well-diversified portfolio of equities has far outperformed that of risk-free,...

The sovereign's intention to issue inflation-linked bonds (ILB) is to save money. More than 15 years' experience with this financial instrument in the United States and in several other countries has led to the conclusion that these bonds are costly and basically characterized by low liquidity...

We provide a model able to compute a threshold level for the public debt/GDP ratio, such that a country can be rescued by an official lender (e.g. ESM or IMF). The critical level is defined as the maximum level of debt/GDP, such that it is still possible to put the debt/GDP ratio on a...

We show that in both index-linked bond markets and inflation swap markets liquidity is an important determinant of prices. We do so by means of an asset pricing model with a liquidity risk factor and asset-specific liquidity characteristics. This liquidity risk factor is based on the measures of...

I document that higher debt-to-GDP ratio: (i) predicts higher excess stock returns with 30% five-year out-of-sample R-squared; (ii) correlates with higher credit risk premia in corporate bond excess returns and yield spreads; (iii) is associated with lower real risk-free rates and expected returns...

Fleckenstein et al. (2014) document that nominal Treasuries trade at higher prices than inflation-swapped indexed bonds, which exactly replicate the nominal cash flows. We study whether this mispricing arises from liquidity premiums in inflation-indexed bonds (TIPS) and inflation swaps. Using US...

We analyze how concerns for model misspecification on the part of international lenders affect the desirability of issuing state-contingent debt instruments in a standard sovereign default model à la Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). We show that for the commonly used threshold state-contingent bond...

Fleckenstein et al. (2014) document that nominal Treasuries trade at higher prices than inflation-swapped indexed bonds, which exactly replicate the nominal cash flows. We study whether this mispricing arises from liquidity premiums in inflation-indexed bonds (TIPS) and inflation swaps. Using US...

Most current Eurobond proposals imply substantial cross-subsidisation since some countries partially pay the risk premia for others, thus creating moral hazard and disincentives for fiscal discipline. We suggest, instead, to use standard technologies of financial intermediation like pooling and...