The Sovereign Debt Management Office of the Kingdom of Denmark decided in 2017 to pay direct compensation to certain financial intermediaries for providing liquidity in its sovereign bond market. We analyze the extent to which market liquidity and liquidity premia in the Danish sovereign bond market changed in response to this new market design and, in particular, the compensation offered to liquidity providers. We also investigate whether the new compensation scheme for market makers is cost-efficient for the Kingdom of Denmark through lower bond liquidity premia, bond yields and debt service costs. We find that improvements in market liquidity conditions lead to potential savings, net of costs, for the Kingdom of Denmark of DKK 23.12 million over the lifetime of the bonds issued every year as a direct benefit, and to a decrease in interest expenses for the real economy of about 0.07% of nominal GDP as one indirect benefit. From these findings, we derive policy recommendations for the Kingdom of Denmark, as well as other European countries that currently generally employ an indirect rather than a direct compensation scheme.

This paper investigates how individual attention triggers influence financial risk-taking based on a large sample of trading records from a brokerage service that sends standardized push messages on stocks to retail investors. By exploiting the data in a difference-in-differences (DID) setting, we find attention triggers increase investors’ risk-taking. Our DID coefficient implies attention trades carry, on average, a 19 percentage-point-higher leverage than non-attention trades. We provide a battery of cross-sectional analyses to identify the groups of investors and stocks for which this effect is stronger.

We analyze the impact of the introduction of credit default swaps (CDSs) on real decision-making within the firm. Our structural model predicts that CDS introduction increases debt capacity more when uncertainty about the credit events that trigger CDS payment is lower. Using a sample of more than 56,000 firms across 51 countries, we find that CDSs increase leverage more in legal and market environments where uncertainty about CDS obligations is reduced and when property rights are weaker. Our results highlight the importance of legal uncertainty in the interpretation of the underlying trigger events of global credit derivatives.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique setting in which to evaluate the importance of a country’s fiscal capacity in explaining the relation between economic growth shocks and sovereign default risk. For a sample of 30 developed countries, we find a positive and significant sensitivity of sovereign default risk to the intensity of the virus’s spread for fiscally constrained governments. Supporting the fiscal channel, we confirm the results for Eurozone countries and U.S. states, for which monetary policy can be held constant. Our analysis suggests that financial markets penalize sovereigns with low fiscal space, impairing their resilience to external shocks.