Essays in empirical finance

This dissertation is a collection of three chapters on the unconventional monetary policy effects and the term structure of corporate bond and equity risk premia. The first chapter sheds light on the impact of the recent European Central Bank lending policies on the financial sector stability. The key finding is that the central bank interventions reduced the fragility of the banking sector, predominantly by reducing the severity and prevalence of bank-run equilibria. The second chapter provides a new implied estimate of the term structure of corporate bond risk premia. The main result is that the maturity-matched risk premium is increasing with maturity, in line with most canonical asset pricing models; however, the cross-sectional sorts reveal a high degree of heterogeneity in the term structure slope. Finally, the third chapter proposes a novel methodology to estimate the term structure of equity term structure for any cross-sectional portfolio. The method documents similar qualitative patterns for equities as the second chapter presents for corporate bonds.