This paper uses international cross-sectional and time-series infrastructure bond risk premium and credit rating history data from the past decade to examine the factors that influence investor risk perceptions and that inflate the cost of borrowing for essential infrastructure. The information...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of firms' credit ratings, in the context of a multi-period moral hazard problem, in which borrowers have incentives to repudiate their debt obligations. Borrowers with short credit histories face the poorest incentives, and (depending on initial conditions) for...

To obtain the maximum benefits from diversification, financial theory suggests that investors should invest internationally because of the larger potential for risk reduction stemming, from the lower correlation existing between assets of different countries. The question that we raise in this...

The aim of this paper is to clarify the concept of alternative trading systems (ATS) and to present an interpretation of their role in the securities markets. The discussion focuses on trading venues related to debt instruments and equities. Geographically, the American and European markets are...

This paper tests the existence of a risk premium in the one-month and three-month forward exchange markets.

We measure the amount of smoothing achieved through various components of the government deficit in Eu and OECD countries. For EU countries, at the 1-year frequency, 13 % of shocks to GDP are smoothed via government consumption, 18 percent via transfers, 5 % via subsidies, while taxes provide no...

In this paper we model Value-at-Risk (VaR) for daily stock index returns using a collection of parametric models of the ARCH family based on the skewed Student distribution. We show that models that rely on a symmetric density distribution for the error term underperform with respect to skewed...

The usual measure of the undiversifiable risk of a portfolio is its beta. Recent research has allowed beta estimates to vary over time, often based on symmetric multivariate GARCH models. There is, however, widespread evidence in the literature that the volatilities of asset returns, in...

There is much evidence in the literature that the volatility of asset returns, in particular those from stock markets, show evidence of an asymmetric response to good and bad news. This paper considers the impact of news on time varying hedges for financial futures. The models are compared with...

The structure of this paper is as follows. in section 1, I describe the welfare gain function. In section 2, I use stock returns for the G-7 countries to examine stock returns using standard mean- variance analysis. In section 3, I develop a single general equilibrium framework for examining...