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...

We extend the Lucas asset pricing tree economy to a heterogeneous population.Perturbative methods are applied to explicitly calculate the secondorder response of asset returns to heterogeneity. We discover thatthere exists a unique "best homogeneous approximation" to a weakly...

The innovations of this paper are fourfold: First we study return differentials more comprehensivelythan in the previous literature by comparing three asset classes : money market instruments, bonds andequities across countries. Second, we document the structure of international portfolio...

We develop a new completely affine model of the term structure of interest rates, in which the statevariables evolve as a matrix-valued process of stochastically correlated factors. This setting grants a newelement of flexibility in the simultaneous modeling of stochastic volatilities and...

We prove that, in a heterogeneous economy with scale invariantutilities, the yield of a long term bond is determined by the agent with maximalexpected marginal utility.We also prove that the same result holds for the longterm forward rates.Furthermore, we apply Cramer’s large deviations...