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The purpose of this paper is to investigate if credit markets believe in the existence of a central government guarantee and if this can be observed in the yield spread of the municipal sector. This is done by decomposing the municipal bond yield spread into liquidity and credit risk premiums by variance decomposition in a vector autoregressive setting – an approach which, to our knowledge, has not been previously suggested. Our results show that 62% or 50 basis points of the yield spread is explained by the chosen liquidity and credit variables. The liquidity risk premium makes up 35% or 28 basis points of the yield spread and credit makes up 27% or 22 basis points. Thus, investors and creditors in general do not believe in the existence of such a guarantee.

AbstractThis note proposes a decomposition of the familiar scalar multivariate risk premium into components which can be easily interpreted in the context of consumer theory. The premium under consideration is the standard one used to ascertain the impact of price and income risk on consumer welfare. This proposed premium decomposition allows for a more intuitive identification of the detrimental and beneficial effects that arise from income and price risk. As an illustrative example, this decomposition is used to ascertain the welfare effects arising from the price fluctuations experienced by UK households over the period 1963–97.

Credit risk has become an important factor driving government bond returns. We therefore introduce an asset pricing model which exploits information contained in both forward interest rates and forward CDS spreads. Our empirical analysis covers euro-zone countries with German government bonds as credit risk-free assets. We construct a market factor from the first three principal components of the German forward curve as well as a common and a country-specific credit factor from the principal components of the forward CDS curves. We find that predictability of risk premiums of sovereign euro-zone bonds improves substantially if the market factor is augmented by a common and an orthogonal country-specific credit factor. While the common credit factor is significant for most countries in the sample, the country-specific factor is significant mainly for peripheral euro-zone countries. Finally, we find that during the current crisis period, market and credit risk premiums of government bonds are negative over long subintervals, a finding that we attribute to the presence of financial repression in euro-zone countries.

We consider the risk premium demanded by a decision maker in order to be indifferent between obtaining a new level of wealth with certainty, or to participate in a lottery which either results in unchanged wealth or an even higher level than what can be obtained with certainty. We study preferences such that the corresponding relative risk premium is a decreasing function of present wealth, and we determine the set of associated utility functions. We find a new characterization of risk vulnerability and determine a large set of utility functions, closed under summation and composition, which are both risk vulnerable and have decreasing relative risk premium. We finally introduce the notion of partial risk neutral preferences on binary lotteries and show that partial risk neutrality is equivalent to preferences with decreasing relative risk premium.

Credit risk has become an important factor driving government bond returns. We therefore introduce an asset pricing model which exploits information contained in both forward interest rates and forward CDS spreads. Our empirical analysis covers euro-zone countries with German government bonds as credit risk-free assets. We construct a market factor from the first three principal components of the German forward curve as well as a common and a country-specific credit factor from the principal components of the forward CDS curves. We find that predictability of risk premiums of sovereign euro-zone bonds improves substantially if the market factor is augmented by a common and an orthogonal country-specific credit factor. While the common credit factor is significant for most countries in the sample, the country-specific factor is significant mainly for peripheral euro-zone countries. Finally, we find that during the current crisis period, market and credit risk premiums of government bonds are negative over long subintervals, a finding that we attribute to the presence of financial repression in euro-zone countries.