This paper analyzes the effects of political uncertainty on prices and liquidity of sovereign bonds. We focus on the time period of the European sovereign debt crisis and on Italian government bonds. We study the effect of Euro, G8 and G20 summits together with relevant elections. Focusing on...

In this paper we examine the influence of the granularity of a rating system on the resulting regulatory capital requirements with respect to the framework released by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (Basel II). We define granularity as the number of cohorts or rating classes used to...

Many pricing and risk management models need credit spread curves as an input. In the corporate bond market the estimation of credit spread curves is not trivial. Most issuers have only too few bonds outstanding and frequently these bonds are denominated in different currencies. To ensure a...

It is the aim of this paper to measure the impact of liquidity on European Monetary Union (EMU) government bond prices. Although there is a growing theoretical and empirical literature on liquidity effects in fixed income markets there is no clear answer how to measure liquidity and whether...

The validation of credit rating systems has recently attracted particular interest both from banks and their supervisors as well as from academic research. Whereas the main interest has been focused on backtesting methods, alternative approaches such as benchmarking are of growing importance....

We suggest a new framework for the use of multi-rater information in the validation of credit rating systems, applicable in any validation process where rating information from different sources is available. As our validation framework does not rely on historical default information it appears...

Accurate rating systems are of key importance for banks to price and manage their loan portfolios. In this paper we analyze the choice of the rating technology in an oligopolistic banking sector. In our model the rating system estimates the probabilities of default for the individual borrowers...

The term structure of interest rates is an important input for basically every pricing model and is mostly calibrated on coupon bond prices. Therefore the estimated interest rates should accurately explain the market prices of these bonds. However nearly all empirical papers on interest rate...