Institutional investors often have to decide which strategy to use across international business cycles. This is especially important during economic and financial crises. The exogenous nature of the outbreak of the dramatic COVID-19 crisis represents a unique opportunity to understand the...

This paper examines the impact of changes in economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and COVID-19 shock on stock returns. Tests of 16 global stock market indices, using monthly data from January 1990 to August 2021, suggest a negative relation between the stock return and a country’s EPU. Evidence...

We develop a multivariate credit risk model for the term structures of sovereign and bank credit default swaps. First, we separate the probability of joint defaults of large Eurozone sovereigns (systemic risk) from that of sovereign-specific defaults (country risk). Then, we quantify individual...

This note sketches the issues that arise while interpreting the relation between macroeconomic volatility and financial risk premia from the perspective of the standard consumption-based asset pricing model. The relation arises from the fact that all assets are priced by the same 'pricing...

In the U.S., over 1873-2014, an increase in bank credit is associated with a lower risk of a financial crisis in the near future. Bank credit expansion predicts lower excess returns and volatility for the aggregate stock market, and this predictive relation varies in the cross-section and is...

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We characterize their behavior using some 3,200 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Before the financial crisis, spreads are 10 times more volatile in emerging economies than in...

This project studies and models key macroeconomic variables and their impact on sovereign risk premia across some European economies and developed countries. The sample is divided into groups of countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU), the 'standalone' economies that are outside the EMU...

This paper investigates the impact of infectious diseases on the evolution of sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads for a panel of 77 advanced and developing countries. Using annual data over the 2004-2020 period, we find that infectious-disease outbreaks have no discernible effect on CDS...

The admission by the Greek government on October 18, 2009, of large-scale accounting fraud in its national accounts sparked an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis that rapidly spread to the Euro-Zone's weakest member states. As the crisis increasingly drove a wedge between a seemingly resilient...