Abstract
This doctoral thesis consists of 4 self-contained chapters: Sovereign Credit Default Swap Premia. This comprehensive review of the literature on sovereign CDS spreads highlights current academic debates and contrasts them with contradictory statements from the popular press. Real Economic Shocks and Sovereign Credit Risk. New empirical evidence highlights that global macroeconomic risk unspanned by global financial risk bears some responsibility for the strong co-movement in sovereign spreads. A model with only two global macroeconomic state variables rationalizes the existence of time-varying risk premia as a compensation for exposure to common U.S. business cycle risk. The Term Structure of CDS Spreads and Sovereign Credit Risk. The term structure of CDS spreads is an informative signal about the relative importance of global and country-specific risk factors for the time variation of sovereign credit spreads. An empirically validated model illustrates how local risk matters relatively more when the slope is negative, while systematic risk bears more responsibility when the slope is positive. Squeezed Everywhere - Disentangling Types of Liquidity and Testing Limits-to-Arbitrage. The CDS-Bond basis is used as a laboratory to disentangle different types of liquidity and to test limits-of-arbitrage. While asset-specific liquidity is cross-correlated in both the cash and derivative market, funding and market liquidity matter only for the former. The tests find strong evidence in favor of margin-based asset pricing and flight-to-quality effects.