ABSTRACT We examine the relative pricing of nominal Treasury bonds and Treasury inflation‐protected securities in the presence of U.S. default risk. Hedged breakeven inflation is significantly positively related to U.S. default risk, driven by correlation between shocks to default risk and both shocks to inflation swap premia and Treasury yields. To understand the mechanisms through which default risk is related to inflation swaps and sovereign yields, we estimate an affine term structure model to capture their joint dynamics. Our estimation implies that the interaction between inflation dynamics and default is the primary source of differential pricing.

We propose a discrete-time affine pricing model that simultaneously allows for (i) the presence of systemic entities by departing from the no-jump condition on the factors’ conditional distribution, (ii) contagion effects, and (iii) the pricing of credit events. Our affine framework delivers explicit pricing formulas for default-sensitive securities such as bonds and credit default swaps (CDSs). We estimate a euro-area multicountry version of the model and address economic questions related to the pricing of sovereign credit risk. We find that both frailty (common factors) and contagion phenomena are important to account for the joint dynamics of credit spreads. Our results also provide evidence of credit-event pricing, which is at the source of substantial credit risk premiums, even for short maturities. Finally, we extract measures of depreciation-at-default from CDSs denominated in different currencies. This paper was accepted by Kay Giesecke, finance.

A bank that lends on the unsecured market requires compensations for facing the default risk of the borrowing bank (credit risk) and the risk associated to its own future funding needs (liquidity risk). In this paper, we propose a quadratic term-structure model of the spreads between unsecured and risk-free interbank rates. Our no-arbitrage econometric framework allows us to decompose the term structure of spreads into credit and liquidity components and to identify risk premia associated with each of these two risks. Our results suggest that, over the period 2012–2013, most of the reduction in interbank spreads comes from a decrease in liquidity-related risk components.