The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteenGerman states (Länder) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of acapital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed incomemarket for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals that...

Assessments of investors’ risk appetite/aversion stance via indicators often yields resultswhich seem unsatisfactory (see e.g. Illing and Aaron (2005)). Understanding howsuch indicators work therefore seems essential for further improvements. The presentpaper seeks to contribute to this...

This paper investigates the returns and flows of German money marketfunds before and during the liquidity crisis of 2007/2008. The mainfindings of this paper are: In liquid times money market funds enhancedtheir returns by investing in less liquid papers. By doing so they outperformedother funds...

We study the risk of holding credit default swaps (CDS) in the trading book. In particular, wecompare the Value at Risk (VaR) of a CDS position to the VaR for investing in the respectivefirm’s equity. Our sample consists of CDS – stock price pairs for 86 actively traded firms overthe period...

In order to analyze the pricing of portfolio credit risk – as revealed by tranche spreadsof a popular credit default swap (CDS) index – we extract risk-neutral probabilities ofdefault (PDs) and physical asset return correlations from single-name CDS spreads. Thetime profile and overall level...

This is study empirically examine the impact of market conditions on credit spreads asmotivated by recently developed structural credit risk models. Using credit default swap(CDS) spreads, we find that, in the time series, average credit spreads are decreasing inGDP growth rate, but increasing...

Interest income is the most important source of revenue for most of thebanks. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of different interest ratescenarios on the banks' interest income. As we do not know the interest ratesensitivity of real banks, we construct for each bank a portfolio with...