The German employment miracle with a weak decline in employment and low unemployment during the great recession seems to be a good example for a successful labour market reform. While the aggregate level of job turnover seems to be stable over time, there are nevertheless concerns about rising...

We model credit rating histories as continuous-time discrete-state Markov processes. Infrequent monitoring of the debtors' solvency will result in erroneous observations of the rating transition times, and consequently in biased parameter estimates. We develop a score test against such...

There is a growing empirical literature studying whether fiscal rules reduce borrowing costs. Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether these rules are effective genuinely or just because they mirror fiscal preferences of politicians and voters. In our analysis of European bond spreads,...

This paper shows that the consumption-based asset pricing model (C-CAPM) with low-probability disaster risk rationalizes large pricing errors, i.e., Euler equation errors. This result is remarkable, since Lettau and Ludvigson (2009) show that leading asset pricing models cannot explain sizeable...

We investigate the role of competition on the outcome of Austrian Treasury auctions. EU accession by Austria provides a natural experiment causing an exogenous increase in the number of bidders in Treasury Auctions. Difference-in-difference estimates suggest that the increased number in bidders...

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...

The recent increase of interest rate spreads in Europe and their apparent detachment from underlying fundamental variables has generated a debate on multiple equilibria in the sovereign bond market (see De Grauwe and Ji (2012)). We critically evaluate this hypothesis, by pointing towards an...

This paper provides an explanation why garbage as a measure of consumption implies a several times lower coefficient of relative risk aversion in the consumption-based asset pricing model than consumption based on the official National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA): Unlike garbage, NIPA...

We analyze the theoretical moments of a nonlinear approximation to real business cycle model with stochastic volatility and recursive preferences. We find that the conditional heteroskedasticity of stochastic volatility operationalizes a time-varying risk adjustment channel that induces...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a convincing approach towards resolving prominent asset pricing puzzles. Whilst the simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a...