Faculty Profile

Sven Klingler

Assistant Professor - Department of Finance

Biography

Link to my personal website

My research interests are in the area of asset pricing with financial frictions. I study how funding frictions affect hedge fund returns, long-term interest rate swap rates, and CDS premiums of safe sovereigns. In a recent paper, we analyze how more trading activity affects the performance of Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs).

Publications

Klingler, Sven & Sundaresan, Suresh M. (2018)

An Explanation of Negative Swap Spreads: Demand for Duration from Underfunded Pension Plans

Journal of Finance Doi: 10.1111/jofi.12750

The 30‐year U.S. swap spreads have been negative since September 2008. We offer a novel explanation for this persistent anomaly. Through an illustrative model, we show that underfunded pension plans optimally use swaps for duration hedging. Combined with dealer banks' balance sheet constraints, this demand can drive swap spreads to become negative. Empirically, we construct a measure of the aggregate funding status of defined benefit pension plans and show that this measure helps explain 30‐year swap spreads. We find a similar link between pension funds' underfunding and swap spreads for two other regions.

Klingler, Sven & Lando, David (2018)

Safe Haven CDS Premiums

The Review of financial studies, 31(5), s. 1856- 1895. Doi: 10.1093/rfs/hhy021 - Full text in research archive

Credit default swaps can be used to lower the capital requirements of dealer banks entering into uncollateralized derivatives positions with sovereigns. We show in a model that the regulatory incentive to obtain capital relief makes CDS contracts valuable to dealer banks and empirically that, consistent with the use of CDS for regulatory purposes, there is a disconnect between changes in bond yield spreads and in CDS premiums, especially for safe sovereigns. Additional empirical tests related to the volume of contracts outstanding, effects of regulatory proxies, and the corporate bond and CDS markets support that CDS contracts are used for capital relief.

Academic Degrees
Year Academic Department Degree
2017 Copenhagen Business School PhD
Work Experience
Year Employer Job Title
2017 - Present BI Norwegian Business School Assistant professor

BI Business Review articles: