Corporate bond returns in the major developed economies increase with risk, as measured by maturity and ratings. From a pricing perspective, we find little to no evidence against the World CAPM model, where the market consists out of equity, sovereign and corporate bonds. However, from a factor...

The enlargement of the European monetary union to include the accession countries (ACs) will not lead to higher average inflation in the enlarged euro area, but only to inflation redistribution across countries if continuity of the monetary policy framework is preserved. In the short term,...

Credit spreads may be jointly driven by developments that are orthogonal to the current state of the economy. We show that this unobserved systematic component is demanded to hedge against adverse economic fl?uctuations. Using either yield-to-maturity spreads or asset swap spreads for 2345...

Assessing the impact of the Asset Purchase Programme (APP) by the European Central Bank (ECB) on euro area sovereign yields is challenging, because the monetary policy announcement in January 2015 was already implicitly communicated to the market in the second half of 2014. Therefore, to...

We study correlations between the risk-free rate and sovereign yields of ten euro area countries using smooth transition conditional correlation GARCH (STCC-GARCH) specifications, controlling for credit risk in mean and variance equations and conditioning non-linearly to liquidity risk....