Oil price shocks and bond risk premia: Evidence from a panel of 15 countries

We study the effect of oil price shocks on bond risk premia. Based on Baumeister and Hamilton (2019), we identify the different sources of oil price shocks using a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model of the global market for crude oil. These structural factors are then used as unspanned factors in an affine term structure model based on the representation of Joslin et al. (2014). This is done for a total of 15 countries. Unspanned factors are responsible for most of the variability in bond risk premia for short holding periods, while spanned factors dominate the variance decomposition for longer holding periods. In both cases, global oil supply and global economic activity are clearly the most important unspanned shocks. A historical decomposition around the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis shows the clear influence of global economic activity shocks during the months of February and March 2020, increasing bond risk premia significantly.