We use a dynamic multipath general-to-specific algorithm to capture structural instability in the link between euro area sovereign bond yield spreads against Germany and their underlying determinants over the period January 1999-August 2011. We offer new evidence suggesting a significant...

The proliferation of factor investing strategies in recent years has highlighted the idea that a portfolio can harvest improved risk-adjusted returns through timed exposure to risk factors during times of elevated risk premia. While there is a large body of research on such risk factors and risk...

Empirical research over the last decade has uncovered predictive relationships between the slope of the yield curve and subsequent real activity and inflation. Some of these relationships are highly significant, but their theoretical motivations suggest that they may not be stable over time. We...

The main goal of this paper is to better understand the behavior of credit spreads in the past and the potential risk of unexpected future credit spread changes. One important consideration to note regarding credit spreads is the fact that bond spreads contain a liquidity premium, which...

A model selection test for non-nested misspecified diffusion models is developed by using a criterion based on the Kullback-Leibler information criterion in a new asymptotic framework that accounts for the relative significance of diffusion functions for high frequency data. The test examines...

This paper analyses the cross-country heterogeneity in retail bank lending rates in the euro area and presents newly developed pass-through models that account for the riskiness of borrowers, the balance sheet constraints of lenders and sovereign debt tensions affecting interest rate-setting...

Affine mortality models are well suited for theoretical and practical application in pricing and risk management of mortality risk. They produce consistent, closed-form stochastic survival curves allowing for the efficient valuation of mortality-linked claims. We model USA age-cohort mortality...

Does Indian sovereign yield volatility reflect economic fundamentals, or whether it is a self-generated force flowing through markets with little connection to such fundamentals? To answer the question, this research explores the volatility dynamics and measures the persistence of shocks to the...

Future evolution of mortality poses important challenges for life insurance, pension funds, public policy and fiscal planning. Indeed, when fair values, premium rates and risk reserves are computed, sound and accurate models to forecast stochastic longevity are needed. In this paper, we propose...

Contrary to the predictions of the rational expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates, empirical evidence suggests that the term spread between long and short rates fails to forecast future movements of long term rates although its forecasts of future short term rates are...