Hedging European government bond portfolios during the recent sovereign debt crisis

Wolfgang Bessler and Dominik Wolff

Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, 2014, vol. 33, issue C, 379-399

Abstract: The sovereign debt crisis challenged investors in European government bonds to deal with volatile interest rate spreads. For managing sovereign risk, “Eurex” introduced futures contracts on Italian government bonds reflecting risks of lower rated countries. We analyze hedging strategies for bond portfolios with futures on German and Italian government bonds before and during the sovereign debt crisis and evaluate their out-of-sample hedging effectiveness. Before the crisis, German futures were efficient instruments for hedging government bond portfolios, but during the crisis, a composite hedge combining German and Italian futures was superior. Allocating bonds to high and low sovereign risk-buckets and hedging these buckets individually further enhanced the hedging efficiency.

Keywords: G01; G12; G13; G15; Sovereign debt crisis; Fixed income securities; Bond portfolio management; Interest rate futures; Hedge ratio; Hedging effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1042443114001103
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:intfin:v:33:y:2014:i:c:p:379-399

DOI: 10.1016/j.intfin.2014.08.006

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money is currently edited by I. Mathur and C. J. Neely

More articles in Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().