In this work, I study the impact of high-frequency trading (HFT) on price discovery and volatility in the Bund futures market. Using a new dataset based on microseconds, the focus of the study is on the reaction of high-frequency traders (HFTs) to major macroeconomic news events. I show that...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

Recent regulatory initiatives such as the European Deposit Insurance Scheme propose a change in the coverage and backing of deposit insurances. An assessment of these proposals requires a thorough understanding of what drives depositors' withdrawal decisions. We show that Google searches for...

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the natural resource curse, which postulates a negative link between natural resource abundance and economic growth. It shows empirically that resource-rich countries appear to have a less developed financial system and investigates a potential...

Using a unique data set that contains the complete ownership structure of the German stock market, we study the momentum and contrarian trading of different investor groups. Foreign investors and financial institutions, and especially mutual funds, are momentum traders, whereas private...

The beta dispersion, which is the spread of betas on a stock market, can be interpreted as a measure of market vulnerability. This study examines the economic idea of the beta dispersion and its application as a market return predictor. Based on the empirical beta dispersion observed in the US...

This paper studies the behavior of corporate bond spreads during different market regimes between 2004 and 2016. Applying a Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MS-VAR) model, we document that the dynamic impact of spread determinants varies substantially with market conditions. In periods of...

In a parsimonious regime switching model, expected consumption growth varies over time. Adding in ation as a conditioning variable, we uncover two states in which expected consumption growth is low, one with high and one with negative expected in ation. Embedded in a general equilibrium asset...

We apply Bayesian Model Averaging and a frequentistic model space analysis to assess the pricing-determinants of credit default swaps (CDS). Our study focuses on the complete model space of plausible models covering most of the variables and specifications used elsewhere in the literature,...

This paper presents a new approach, based on the Merton model, to decomposing corporate bond spreads into the expected loss, bond risk premium and liquidity premium components. The approach focuses on establishing the bond risk premium using the equity risk premium and the hedge ratio, which are...