We isolate a U.S. dollar currency premium by comparing corporate bonds issued in the dollar and the euro by firms o utside t he U .S. a nd e uro a rea. We make s everal empirical observations that dissect the perceived advantage of borrowing in the dollar. First, while the dollar dominates...

Are Bunds special? This paper estimates the 'Bund premium' as the difference in convenience yields between other sovereign safe assets and German government bonds adjusted for sovereign credit risk, liquidity and swap market frictions. A higher premium suggests less substitutability of sovereign...

This paper examines the determinants of sub-national governments risk premia using secondary market data for U.S., Canada, Australia and Germany. It finds that, as for central governments, fiscal fundamentals matter in the pricing of risk premia, and sub-national governments with higher public...

What determines the ability of low-income developing countries to issue bonds in international capital and what explains the spreads on these bonds? This paper examines these questions using a dataset that includes emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) that issued sovereign bonds at...

Investors seek to hedge against interest rate risk by taking long or short positions on bonds ofdifferent maturities. We study changes in risk taking behavior in a low interest rateenvironment by estimating a market stochastic discount factor that is non-linear and thereforeconsistent with the...

We analyze how concerns for model misspecification on the part of international lenders affect the desirability of issuing state-contingent debt instruments in a standard sovereign default model à la Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). We show that for the commonly used threshold state-contingent bond...