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Professor Augustin wins 2014 FNR Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis

Published: 15 July 2014

Professor Patrick Augustin has won the 2014 FNR Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis 2014 given by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) for his thesis entitled, “Essays on Sovereign Credit Risk and Credit Default Swap Spreads.” The FNR provides funding for all branches of science and the humanities with an emphasis on strategically aligned research domains. Each year, the FNR attributes one Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis to an individual who has concluded his/her PhD with a dissertation of outstanding scientific quality. Read more about the award.

About “Essays on Sovereign Credit Risk and Credit Default Swap Spreads” (2013, Stockholm School of Economics):

This doctoral thesis consists of four 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 Limitsto- 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.