Academic Research

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Year Published: 2021

Author(s): Conall O'Sullivan, Vassilios G. Papavassiliou

Abstract: Using high-frequency data from the MTS trading platform, we examine return and volatility spillover effects across different maturities in the European sovereign bond market over tranquil and crisis periods. The longer-term benchmark securities of core countries are the largest net volatility transmitters, whereas the shorter-term bench- marks of periphery countries are the leading net receivers of volatility shocks. Moreover, the short-end and the long-end of the yield curve in both regions emerge as the sole net recipients of return spillovers. We note that bonds of periphery countries become volatility spillover transmitters during important macroeconomic events such as credit rating downgrades and financial assistance packages to financially distressed countries.

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Year Published: 2019

Author(s): Harald Kinateder, Vassilios G. Papavassiliou

Abstract: This paper analyzes whether realized higher moments are able to predict out-of-sample sovereign bond returns using high-frequency data from the European bond market. We study bond return predictability over tranquil and crisis periods and across core and periphery markets at the index and country level. We provide fresh evidence that realized kurtosis is the dominant predictor of subsequent returns among higher moments and other predictors such as CDS spreads, short-term interest rates and implied stock market volatility. Our findings further underline that sovereign bond return predictability is stronger during crisis periods and more pronounced for bonds of lower credit ratings.

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Year Published: 2019

Author(s): Alfonso Dufour, Miriam Marra, Ivan Sangiorgi

Abstract: Using a novel dataset, we study intraday trades of overnight general collateral repurchase agreements (repos) on Italian government bonds. We focus both on repos cleared by central counterparties (CCPs) and traded bilaterally. Intraday bond supply, liquidity and duration significantly affect the spread of repo rates over the European Central Bank (ECB) deposit rate, but after the ECB quantitative easing interventions this impact is much reduced. During the European sovereign debt crisis, the increase in margins further deteriorates repo costs, creating a negative procyclical effect. Once we control for the impact of margin costs, CCP-based repos do not appear to be significantly cheaper than bilateral repos. We also show that bonds with lower liquidity and specialness, greater supply and longer duration are more likely to be selected as collateral. However, during the crisis, CCP-repo borrowers choose collateral bonds with higher liquidity and lower duration to reduce margin and repo trading costs.

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Year Published: 2019

Author(s): Hanyu Zhang, Alfonso Dufour

Abstract: This paper studies the intraday volatility of European government bonds under the framework of the multiplicative component GARCH model (Engle and Sokalska, 2012). Intraday return volatility is specified as the product of daily volatility, intraday seasonality, and a unit GARCH process. The model is applied to 10-year European government bonds during the sovereign debt crisis. We observe large transitory intraday volatility often due to illiquidity effects and outliers. We suggest a flexible and effective procedure for jointly filtering mid-quote prices and estimating volatility models. Finally, we show that intraday data contain relevant information for daily volatility forecasts

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Year Published: 2019

Author(s): Alfonso Dufour, Miriam Marra, Ivan Sangiorgi

Abstract: We study the dynamics of specialness for 1-day repo contracts on Italian government bonds over a 10-year sample period. As predicted by Duffie's (1996) model, our results show that collateral supply is a significant factor for specialness. However, we enrich that finding by also showing a clear impact from repo liquidity, collateral riskiness, information uncertainty, and short-selling proxies, revealing the importance of speculative bond demand for specialness. During crisis periods, bond fire sales and European Central Bank interventions also have a large impact on repo specialness. We identify recurrent patterns for specialness around bond auctions. Specialness increases steadily from the auction announcement date until a few days before the auction settlement date, which is consistent with overbidding behaviour and a short selling of treasuries (via reverse repos) from primary dealers ahead of auctions.

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Year Published: 2016

Author(s): Michael Schneider, Fabrizio Lillo, Loriana Pelizzon

Abstract: 

Amid increasing regulation, structural changes of the market and Quantitative Easing as well as extremely low yields, concerns about the market liquidity of the Eurozone sovereign debt markets have been raised. We aim to quantify illiquidity risks, especially such related to liquidity dry-ups, and illiquidity spillover across maturities by examining the reaction to illiquidity shocks at high frequencies in two ways:

a) the regular response to shocks using a variance decomposition and

b) the response to shocks in the extremes by detecting illiquidity shocks and modeling those as multivariate Hawkes processes

We find that:

a) market liquidity is more fragile and less predictable when an asset is very illiquid and,

b) the response to shocks in the extremes is structurally different from the regular response. In 2015 long-term bonds are less liquid and the medium-term bonds are liquid, although we observe that in the extremes the medium-term bonds are increasingly driven by illiquidity spillover from the long-term titles.

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Year Published: 2014

Author(s): Alfonso Dufour, Marcelo Perlin, Chris Brooks

Abstract: This paper examines the determinants of cross-platform arbitrage profits. We develop a structural model that enables us to decompose the likelihood of an arbitrage opportunity into three distinct factors: the fixed cost to trade the opportunity, the level at which one of the platforms delays a price update and the impact of the order flow on the quoted prices (inventory and asymmetric information effects). We then investigate the predictions from the theoretical model for the European Bond market with the estimation of a probit model. Our main finding is that the results found in the empirical part corroborate strongly the predictions from the structural model. The event of a cross market arbitrage opportunity has a certain degree of predictability where an optimal ex ante scenario is represented by a low level of spreads on both platforms, a time of the day close to the end of trading hours and a high volume of trade.