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...

Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2007, the level and volatility of Euribor – OIS differentials have increased significantly. According to the extant literature, this variability is mainly explained by credit and liquidity risk premia. I provide evidence that part of the...

Term structure models are routinely used by central banks to assess the impact of their communication on market participants' views of future interest rate developments. However, recent studies have pointed out that traditional term structure models can provide misleading indications when policy...

We propose a portfolio selection model based on a class of monotone preferences that coincide with mean-variance preferences on their domain of monotonicity, but differ where mean-variance preferences fail to be monotone and are therefore not economically meaningful. The functional associated to...

We study the dynamics of risk premiums on the German bond market, employing no-arbitrage term-structure models with both observable and unobservable state variables, recently popularized by Ang and Piazzesi (2003). We conduct a specification analysis based on a new canonical representation for...

We propose a single-period portfolio selection model which allows the decision maker to easily deal with uncertainty about the distribution of asset returns. The model is preference-based and relies upon a separate parametrization of risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. A particular...