The risk reducing benefits of the sovereign bond-backed security (SBBS) proposal of Brunnermeier et al (2011, 2016, 2017) have been assessed in terms of the likely losses that different kinds of holders would suffer under simulated default scenarios. However, the effects of mark-to-market losses...

How far to go – and to remain – in the direction of highly expansionary monetary policy hinges on the balance of marginal benefits and costs of additional monetary easing and its expected evolution over time. This paper sketches a framework for assessing this balance and applies it to four...

In the wake of the Great Recession, a massive monetary policy stimulus was provided in the main OECD economies. It helped to stabilise financial markets and avoid deflation. Nonetheless, GDP growth has been sluggish and in some countries lower than expected given the measures taken, and...

In the run-up to the financial crisis, indebtedness of households and non-financial businesses rose to historically high levels in many OECD countries; gross debt of financial companies rose dramatically relative to GDP. Much of the debt accumulation appears to have been based on excessive...

We use unique institutional securities holdings data to examine the trading behaviour of delegated institutional capital and its impact on bond risk premia. We show that institutional fund managers trade strongly procyclically: they actively move into higher yielding, longer duration and lower...

This paper examines households' self-insurance in financial markets when a rare personal disaster, such as disability or long-term unemployment, may occur during working years. Personal disaster risk alters lifetime ex-ante investment choices, even if most workers will not experience a disaster....

This paper investigates whether rumours about Greek exit from the euro area have spilled over into other European countries' sovereign bond yields. Our empirical analysis is based on more than 64,000 daily news items on Grexit between December 2014 and October 2015. We build a Grexit intensity...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the crosssection and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...

Previous work has documented a greater sensitivity of long-term government bond yields to fundamentals in Euro area stress countries during the euro crisis, but we know little about the driver(s) of regime-switches. Our estimates based on a panel smooth threshold regression model quantify and...

While some credit booms are followed by economic underperformance, many are not. Can lending standards help separate good credit booms from bad credit booms contemporaneously? To observe lending standards internationally, I use information from primary debt capital markets. I construct the...