We evaluate the performance of fixed income Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). We find that Treasury ETFs are indeed able to track their benchmarks, but that Investment Grade corporate bond ETFs underperform their benchmarks and High Yield corporate bond ETFs even severely underperform their...

Corporate bond returns consist of two distinct components: an interest rate component, which is default-free and anti-cyclical, and a credit spread component, which is default-risky and pro-cyclical. These components are mutually negatively correlated and their relative importance varies with...

Ibbotson's “Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation” data set is widely used because it provides monthly US financial data series going back to as early as 1926. In this data set, the “default premium” is calculated as the difference between the total returns on long-term corporate bonds and...

We present a new framework for the joint estimation of the default-free term structure of interest rates and corporate credit spread curves. It specifies the discount curve of a specific credit rating class as the sum of the government discount function and a discount spread function. Both...