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...

This paper examines the recent behavior of sovereign interest rates in the euro area, focusing on the 10 year yield spreads relative to Germany for Italy and other euro area countries. Both previous analyses and the new evidence presented in the paper suggest that, in recent months, for several...

Quanto CDS spreads are differences in CDS premiums of the same reference entity but in different currency denominations. Such spreads can arise in arbitrage-free models and depend on the risk of a jump in the exchange rate upon default of the underlying and the covariance between the exchange...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relation between maturity structure, sovereign bond yields and sovereign risk in the Economic and Monetary Union for the period of 1990–2013. The results confirm the existence of an inverse relationship between sovereign bond yields, sovereign risk and...

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...

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...

This paper investigates how a country's economic complexity influences its sovereign yield spread with respect to the United States. Notably, a one-unit increase in the Economic Complexity Index is associated with a reduction of about 87 basis points in the 10-year yield spread. However, this...

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 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...