Empirical Research on Sovereign Debt and Default

The long history of sovereign debt and the associated enforcement problem have attracted researchers in many fields. In this paper, we survey empirical work by economists, historians, and political scientists. As we review the empirical literature, we emphasize parallel developments in the theory of sovereign debt. One major theme emerges. Although recent research has sought to balance theoretical and empirical considerations, there remains a gap between theories of sovereign debt and the data used to test them. We recommend a number of steps that researchers can take to improve the correspondence between theory and data

What Explains Risk Premia in Crude Oil Futures?

This paper studies the existence of risk premia in crude oil futures prices with simple regression and Bayesian VAR models. It also studies the importance of three main risk premia models in explaining and forecasting the risk premia in practice. Whilst the existence of the premia and the validity of the models can be established at certain time points, it turns out that the choice of sample period has a considerable effect on he results. Hence, the risk premia are highly timevarying. The study also establishes a model, based on speculative positions in the futures markets, which has some predictive power for future oil spot prices

Interpreting the Oil Risk Premium: Do Oil Price Shocks Matter?

This paper provides an analysis of the link between the global market for crude oil and oil futures risk premium at the aggregate level. It offers empirical evidence on whether the compensation for risk required by the speculators depends on the type of the structural shock of interest. Understanding the response of the risk premium to unexpected changes in the price of oil can be useful to address some research questions, among which: what is the relationship between crude oil risk premium and unexpected rise in the price of oil? On average, what should speculators expect to receive as a compensation for the risk they are taking on? This work is based on a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model of the crude oil market. Two main results emerge. First, the impulse response analysis provides evidence of a negative relationship between the risk premium and the changes in the price of oil triggered by shocks to economic fundamentals. Second, this analysis shows that the historical decline of the risk premium can be modelled as a part of endogenous effect of the oil market driven shocks