The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteen German states (L¨ander) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of a capital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed income market for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals...

We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we make use of financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on...

Using a large data sample of 58,562 new municipal issues covering the period from 1984 to 2002, we examine whether the quality of advice provided by a financial advisor affects new issue interest costs. We find that higher-quality financial advisors are associated with statistically significant...

For multiple decades, activists have sought to institute an international legal regime that limits the ability of despotic governments to borrow money and then shift those obligations onto more democratic successor governments. Our goal in this article is to raise the possibility of an alternate...

As of this writing in June 2016, the markets are predicting Venezuela to be on the brink of default. On June 1, 2016, the 6 month CDS contract traded at about 7000bps which translates into a likelihood of default of over 90%. Our interest in the Venezuelan crisis is that its outstanding...

This paper investigates how a country's economic complexity influences its sovereign yield spread with respect to the United States. Notably, a one-unit increase in the Economic Complexity Index is associated with a reduction of about 87 basis points in the 10-year yield spread. However, this...

This paper assesses redenomination risk in the euro area. We first estimate daily default-risk-free yield curves for French, German, and Italian bonds that can be redenominated and for bonds that cannot. Then, we extract the compensation for redenomination risk from the yield spreads between...

There is strong evidence that on-the-run U.S. Treasury securities trade much more liquidly and at significantly higher prices than their off-the-run counterparts. We examine if the same phenomenon is present in the German government bond market whose market structure differ markedly from that of...

In the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the debt crisis in the euro area yields on German federal bonds have been exceptionally low. This analysis tries to calculate the profits that the federal government makes due to the low yields. The interest payments that are due to emissions of...

The sovereign's intention to issue inflation-linked bonds (ILB) is to save money. More than 15 years' experience with this financial instrument in the United States and in several other countries has led to the conclusion that these bonds are costly and basically characterized by low liquidity...