Liquidity and Credit Risk Premia in Government Bond Yields

This paper quantifies liquidity and credit premia in German and French government bond yields. For this purpose, we estimate term structures of government-guaranteed agency bonds and exploit the fact that any difference in their yields vis-`a-vis government bonds can be attributed to differences in liquidity premia. Adding the information on risk-free rates, we obtain model-free and model-based gauges of sovereign credit premia, which are an important alternative to the information based on CDS markets. The results allow us to quantify the price impact of so-called JEL Classification: E44, G12, G01