Controllability of longer-term interest rates requires that the persis-tence of their deviations from the central bank's policy rate (i.e. thepolicy spreads) remains suffciently low. This paper applies fractionalintegration techniques to assess the persistence of policy spreads ofeuro area money...

We analyze if and to what extent fundamental macroeconomic factors, temporary influencesor more structural factors have contributed to the low levels of US bond yields over the lastfew years. For that purpose, we start with a general model of interest rate determination. Theempirical part...

The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteenGerman states (Länder) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of acapital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed incomemarket for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals that...

We study the risk of holding credit default swaps (CDS) in the trading book. In particular, wecompare the Value at Risk (VaR) of a CDS position to the VaR for investing in the respectivefirm’s equity. Our sample consists of CDS – stock price pairs for 86 actively traded firms overthe period...

This is study empirically examine the impact of market conditions on credit spreads asmotivated by recently developed structural credit risk models. Using credit default swap(CDS) spreads, we find that, in the time series, average credit spreads are decreasing inGDP growth rate, but increasing...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting atthe intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how thereaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance ofprivate information in agents’ information...

This paper investigates the market pricing of subprime mortgage risk on the basis of data forthe ABX.HE family of indices, which have become a key barometer of mortgage marketconditions during the recent financial crisis. After an introduction into ABX index mechanicsand a discussion of...

We estimate time-varying expected excess returns on the US stock market from 1983to 2008 using a model that jointly captures the arbitrage-free dynamics of stockreturns and nominal bond yields. The model nests the class of affine term structure (ofinterest rates) models. Stock returns and bond...

In this paper we analyzed the violations of UIP for the Swiss Franc against the Dollar, the Euro, the Yen, thePound and the Canadian Dollar using recent data up to fall 2008. This exercise provides the following mainresults : first the Swiss interest rate puzzle disappeared, i.e. mean returns on...

We construct a factor model of the yield curve and specify time series processes forthese factors, so that the innovations are mutually orthogonal. At the same time,the factors are constructed in such a way that they assume clear, intuitive interpretations.The resulting “intelligible...