We present a novel explanation of the cross-sectional seasonality anomaly in government bond returns. The macroeconomic risk premia may accrue unevenly during the calendar year, and the pattern may be transferred to government bond prices. We decompose the seasonality strategy payoffs into...

This study aims to offer a new explanation for the momentum effect in international government bonds. Using cross-sectional and time-series tests, we examine a sample of bonds from 22 countries for the years 1980 through 2018. We document significant momentum profits that are not attributable to...

The relationship between air temperature and sovereign bond returns is founded on competing paradigms: macroeconomic, behavioral, and energy demand-based. Which of these theoretical mechanisms receives support from data? To answer this, we examine four decades of bond data from 31 countries....

We examine whether the predictability and business-cycle dependence of excess returns in US Treasuries can be more naturally explained in terms of state-dependent risk premia or a specific cognitive bias (representativeness). We show that the extremely parsimonious cognitive-bias model in...

We analyze the risk-return trade-off for international (France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, UK, and US) government bond markets and the US stock market. We measure risk by the higher order moments (volatility, skewness, and excess kurtosis) as they are defined in Savva and Theodossiou (2018)....

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the demand for safe government debt to currency unhedged and hedged excess returns in a sample of US mutual funds. We find evidence of active rebalancing towards government bonds that offer relatively higher returns on an unhedged basis, in particular...

Various macroeconomic announcements are known to influence asset price volatility. While contemplating the impact of a variety of macro news surprises, we highlight the importance of Treasury auctions – a news event that has ramifications for interest rates across the economy and which are...

This paper analyzes whether realized higher moments are able to predict out-of-sample sovereign bond returns using high-frequency data from the European bond market. We study bond return predictability over tranquil and crisis periods and across core and periphery markets at the index and...

The valuation of risky debt is central to theoretical and empirical work in corporate finance. Although much is known on the returns and valuation of bonds, there is hardly a consensus on the risk components of the yield spreads. This article aims to investigate the effect of investor sentiment...

Political risk relates to both the ability and the willingness of governments to repay debts. We find that bond prices only slowly adapt to changes in political risk. The expected bond returns for countries whose political risk ratings have improved are higher than those for countries whose...