Supervisory stress tests assess the impact of an adverse macroeconomic scenario on the profitability and capitalisation of a large number of banks. The results of such stress test exercises have recently been disclosed to the public in an attempt to restore confidence and to curb bank opaqueness...

We perform an empirical analysis to identify the main factors driving the liquidity of corporate and government bonds both in ordinary times and in times of market turmoil. Our findings highlight the importance of credit ratings, amount issued and bond duration as factors affecting bond...

In this report we investigate the liquidity of the European fixed income market using a large sample of government, corporate and covered bonds. We construct a robust liquidity index, based on PCA, to aggregate several measures and proxies for liquidity and estimate a multivariate regression...

Based on a large and representative data set we investigate the liquidity of Eurozone government bonds in ordinary times as well as in periods of market turmoil looking at the behavior of several liquidity indicators from 2005 to 2012. We find that the effect of adverse market conditions on...

We perform an empirical analysis to identify the main factors driving the liquidity of corporate and government bonds both in ordinary times and in times of market turmoil. Our findings highlight the importance of credit ratings, amount issued and bond duration as factors affecting bond...

We investigate how the link between bond spreads and credit ratings is affected by the credit cycle. Using a simple model of the credit assessment process, we show that when the debt market is more opaque, the information content of ratings becomes poorer, creating an incentive for investors to...