Working papers

Abstract: We show that the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a surge in the elasticity of non-financial corporate to sovereign credit default swaps in core EU countries, characterized by strong fiscal capacity. For peripheral countries with lower budgetary slackness, the pandemic had essentially no impact on such elasticity. This evidence is consistent with the disaster-induced repricing of government support, which we model through a rare-disaster asset pricing framework with public guarantees and defaultable sovereign debt. The model implies that risk-adjusted guarantees in the core were 2.6 times those in the periphery, suggesting that fiscal capacity buffers provide relief to firms’ financing costs.

Abstract: The Case-Shiller is the reference repeat-sales index for the U.S. residential real estate market, yet it is released with a two-month delay. We find that incorporating recent information from 71 financial and macro predictors improves backcasts, nowcasts, and short-term out-of-sample forecasts of the index returns. Combining individual forecasts delivers large improvements in forecast accuracy at all horizons. Additional gains are obtained with mixed-data sampling methods that exploit the daily frequency of financial variables, reducing the out-of-sample mean squared forecast error by as much as 11% compared to a simple autoregressive benchmark. The forecast improvements are largest during economic turmoil and throughout the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic period.

Abstract: This paper shows that FED policy announcements are accompanied with a significant increase in international co-movement in the sovereign CDS market. The effect is strongest for emerging markets, when the FED relaxes unconventional monetary policies, and for countries that are open to the trading of goods and flows, even with floating exchange rates. The announcements also affect closed economies whose currencies are pegged to the dollar. The evidence is consistent with recent theories of a global financial cycle and the pricing of a FED put. In contrast, ECB announcements hardly affect co-movement, even in the Eurozone.

The risk-return trade-off implies that a riskier investment should demand a higher expected return relative to the risk-free return. The approach of Ghysels, Santa-Clara, and Valkanov (2005) consisted of estimating the risk-return trade-off with a mixed frequency, or MIDAS, approach. MIDAS strikes a compromise between on the one hand the need for longer horizons to model expected returns and on the other hand to use high frequency data to model the conditional volatility required to estimate expected returns. Using the approach of Ghysels, Santa-Clara, and Valkanov (2005), after correcting a coding error pointed out to us, we find that the Merton model holds over samples that exclude financial crises, in particular the Great Depression and/or the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the resulting Great Recession. We find that a simple flight to safety indicator separates the traditional risk-return relationship from financial crises which amount to fundamental changes in that relationship.