Sovereign risk premiums in the European government bond market

This paper provides a study of bond yield differentials among EU government bonds on the basis of a unique data set of issue spreads in the US and DM (Euro) bond market between 1993 and 2009. Interest differentials between bonds issued by EU countries and Germany or the USA contain risk premiums which increase with fiscal imbalances and depend negatively on the issuer’s relative bond market size. The start of the European Monetary Union has shifted market attention to deficit and debt service payments as key measures of fiscal soundness and eliminated liquidity premiums in the euro area. With the financial crisis, the cost of loose fiscal policy has increased considerably.     

Level,slope, curvature of the sovereign yield curve,and fiscal behaviour

We study fiscal behaviour and the sovereign yield curve in the US and Germany. We obtain the latent factors, level, slope and curvature, with the Kalman filter, and use them in a VAR with macro, fiscal and financial stress variables. In the US, fiscal shocks generate an immediate response of the short-end of the yield curve, associated with monetary policy, lasting 6–8 quarters, followed by a response of the whole yield curve lasting 3 years, with an implied elasticity of long-term yields of 80% for the government debt shock and 48% for the budget balance shock. In Germany, fiscal shocks have entailed no significant reactions of the yield curve shape and no response of the monetary policy interest rate, notably after 1999; only in the case of debt shocks there is a short-lived decrease in the medium-end of the yield curve in the following 2nd and 3rd quarters.     

Determinants of sovereign yield spreads in the Eurozone: A Bayesian approach

We analyze the determinants of sovereign yields spreads of EMU member states applying Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to annual panel data from 1999 to 2009. BMA is well-suited in cases of small samples and high model uncertainty. This seems to be the case in modeling sovereign yield spreads in the Eurozone since the literature reports heterogeneous results with respect to significant explanatory variables. We are testing a number of variables reported to be significant in the literature and find that the most likely country specific drivers of yield spreads are fiscal variables such as budget balance and government debt, as well as external sector variables, such as terms of trade, trade balance and openness. Global financing conditions, indicated by the US interest rate, and market sentiments, indicated by corporate bond spreads, are likely to influence sovereign yield spreads.     

An unobserved component model of asset pricing across financial markets

Our research focuses on multifactor asset pricing models that investigate the importance of economic factors in the pricing of assets beyond the scope of the stock market. We present a Bayesian learning model of asset pricing across financial markets in which unobserved components are estimated using a Kalman filter (KF). Economic factors serve to drive the pricing of risk in the market, and agents update expectations recursively, as new information becomes available. We generally find that the Kalman filter provides superior performance and that economic factors like industrial production and unanticipated inflation provide consistent implications across financial markets.     

The increasing default risk of US Treasury securities due to the financial crisis

This paper examines the impact of the current financial crisis on long-term US Treasury yields by testing the impact of a series of events from December 2007 to March 2009 on the spread between 10-year USD LIBOR swap and 10-year US Treasury (constant maturity) rates to measure risk associated with Treasuries. Controlling for the liquidity of the two markets, the default risk of the swap, and the net foreign purchases of Treasury securities, we find that 13 of the tested 20 events have significantly negative coefficients. We conclude that the lower spread is consistent with greater default risk for US Treasury securities.     

Did the repeated debt ceiling controversies embed default risk in US Treasury securities?

We examine whether the financial market charged a default risk premium to US Treasury securities when the US Federal government repeatedly reached the legally binding debt limits between 2002 and 2006. We show that for the first two of the four recurrences since the first episode in 1996, the financial market charged a small default risk premium to the Treasury securities. However, we find no significant evidence of a pricing effect in the last two recurrences. The results suggest that the financial market gradually perceived the budget standoffs as the boy who cried wolf.     

Fiscal spillovers in the Euro area

This paper analyses the dynamic effects of fiscal imbalances in a given EMU member state on the borrowing costs of other countries in the euro area. The estimation of a multivariate, multi-country time series model (specifically a Global VAR, or GVAR) using quarterly data for the EMU period suggests that euro-denominated government yields are strongly linked with each other. However, financial markets seem to be able to discriminate among different issuers. Consequently, fiscal imbalances in Italy and in other peripheral countries should be closely monitored by their EMU partners and the European institutions.     

The effects of tax policy on financial markets: G3 evidence

We investigate the effects of various tax policy innovations on stock market returns. By using a vector autoregressive model that controls for the mutual causality between fiscal policy and financial market performance, we test whether financial markets serve as a transmission mechanism for tax policy innovations. Our findings indicate that indirect taxes have a larger effect on market returns than do labor taxes. Further, corporate tax innovations do not have any statistically significant effect on stock returns. We consider that this finding is a result of a firm's ability to switch between equity financing and bond financing.     

Public Investment in Europe: Evolution and Determinants in perspective*

We describe the evolution of public investment and public capital stocks in Europe over the past three decades. Against this background, we analyse the macroeconomic determinants of public investment, with a special focus on its long‐term trend. We find that public investment has been determined by national income, the stance of budgetary policies and fiscal sustainability considerations. Neither the cost of financing nor the fiscal rules embodied in EMU have had a systemic impact on public investment. The significant downtrend that characterises the evolution of public investment in non‐cohesion countries is chiefly determined by drawn‐out episodes of fiscal consolidation, unrelated to EMU.     

Fiscal policy and financial market movements

This paper estimates fiscal policy reaction function in order to investigate the links between financial market movements and fiscal policy outcomes. An increase in asset prices affects in a positive and significant manner primary balances, with the response reflecting both an increase in government revenues and a fall in government spending. The most important impact on fiscal balances is due to changes in residential property prices. Changes in equity and commercial property prices are also important determinants of fiscal balances. Our findings suggest that the steepening of the slope of the yield curve contributes to expenditure based fiscal discipline.     

Interaction of Government Tiers and Central Banks in a Federation: An Empirical Test

Fiscal rules are necessary to protect monetary policy from the consequences of unsustainable or active fiscal policy for inflation. Monetary unions, such as the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), require even stronger fiscal rules to avoid free riding by regional fiscal authorities on the common monetary policy. By contrast, in a fiscal federation, the federal government internalises the effect of active regional policies on the overall price level. Federal fiscal policy contributes to price stability either by enforcing fiscal rules or by adjusting its own stance. Following Canzoneri, Cumby and Diba (2001), we test whether federal and regional governments in Germany behave in an active or passive way. We find evidence of a spillover effect of unsustainable policies on other regions. The German federal government offsets the effect on the price level by running passive policies. The Bundesbank's prime objective of price stability is therefore endorsed by fiscal policy. The results have implications for the regulation of fiscal policies in the EMU.     

Have the GIPSI settled down? Breaks and multivariate stochastic volatility models for,and not against,the European financial integration

We investigate the integration of the European peripheral financial markets with Germany, France, and the UK using a combination of tests for structural breaks and return correlations derived from several multivariate stochastic volatility models. Our findings suggest that financial integration intensified in anticipation of the Euro, further strengthened by the EMU inception, and amplified in response to the 2007/2008 financial crisis. Hence, no evidence is found of decoupling of the equity markets in more troubled European countries from the core. Interestingly, the UK, despite staying outside the EMU, is not worse integrated with the GIPSI than Germany or France.     

Systemic and Idiosyncratic Risk in EU-15 Sovereign Yield Spreads after Seven Years of Monetary Union

The market capitalisation of international bond markets is much larger than that of international equity markets. However, compared to the large body of literature on international equity market linkages, there are far fewer empirical studies of bond systemic risk or international bond market co-movements. The extent of international bond market linkages merits investigation, as it may have important implications for the cost of financing fiscal deficit, monetary policymaking independence, modelling and forecasting long-term interest rates, and bond portfolio diversification. In this paper, we investigate the relative influence of systemic and idiosyncratic risk factors on yield spreads over 10-year German government securities during the seven years after the beginning of Monetary Integration. We estimate both panel regressions for the two groups of EU-15 countries (EMU and non-EMU) and specific-country regressions for the nine countries in the EMU group and the three countries in the non-EMU group. All estimations include both domestic (differences in market liquidity and credit risk) and international risk factors. The results present clear evidence that it was mostly idiosyncratic rather than systemic risk factors that drove the evolution of 10-year yield spread differentials over Germany in all EMU countries during the seven years after the beginning of Monetary Integration. Conversely, in the case of non-EMU countries, adjusted yield spreads (corrected from the foreign exchange factor) are influenced more by systemic risk factors. The fact that these countries do not share a common Monetary Policy might explain these results, which may show that government bonds from EMU countries have a better safe-haven status that those of non-EMU countries.     

Assessing long-term fiscal developments: A new approach

We use a new approach to assess long-term fiscal developments. By analyzing the time-varying behaviour of the two components of government spending and revenue - responsiveness and persistence -, a feature not captured by automatic stabilisers, we are able to infer about the sources of fiscal deterioration (improvement). Drawing on quarterly data, we estimate recursively these components within a system of government revenue and spending equations using a Three-Stage Least Square method for eight European Union countries plus the US. The results suggest that significant changes in the fiscal stance (including those related to the current crisis) are reflected in the estimates of persistence and responsiveness.     

A production-based model for the term structure

This paper considers the term structure of interest rates implied by a production-based asset pricing model in which the fundamental drivers are investment in equipment and structures as well as inflation. The model matches the average yield curve up to five-year maturity almost perfectly. Longer term yields are roughly as volatile as in the data. The model also generates time-varying bond risk premiums. In particular, when running Fama-Bliss regressions of excess returns on forward premiums, the model produces slope coefficients of roughly half the size of the empirical counterparts. Closed-form expressions highlight the importance of the capital depreciation rates for interest rate dynamics.     

Sovereign risk premia: The link between fiscal rules and stability culture

There is a growing empirical literature studying whether permanent constraints on fiscal policy, such as fiscal rules, reduce sovereign risk premia. Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether these rules are effective genuinely or just because they mirror fiscal preferences of politicians and voters. In our analysis of European bond spreads before the financial crisis, we shed light on this issue by employing several types of stability preference related proxies. These proxies refer to a country's past stability performance, government characteristics and survey results related to general trust. We find evidence that these preference indicators affect sovereign bond spreads and dampen the measurable impact of fiscal rules. Yet, the interaction of stability preferences and rules points to a particular potential of fiscal rules to restore market confidence in countries with a historical lack of stability culture.     

International evidence on bond risk premia

This paper revisits the study of time-varying excess bond returns in international bond markets. Using newly available yield curve data from 10 different countries with independent monetary policy, I test the robustness of Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). For most countries in my sample, I find more modest predictive power for forward rates than originally found by Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) for the US. Their single-factor model captures well the predictability in international data, and this factor also tends to have a tent-shape in most countries of my sample. CP factors are more idiosyncratic across countries than yields or forward rates. Finally, I show that the recent financial crisis has significantly affected the predictability of excess bond returns.     

Valuing Government Obligations When Markets Are Incomplete

We simulate a 10‐period overlapping generations model with aggregate shocks to price safe and risky government obligations using consumption‐asset pricing. Agents cannot trade with future generations to hedge the model's productivity and depreciation shocks, and can only invest in one‐period bonds and risky capital. We find that the pricing of short‐ and long‐dated riskless obligations is anchored to the prevailing risk‐free return. The prices of obligations whose values are proportional to the prevailing wage are essentially identical to those of safe obligations, notwithstanding large macro shocks. On the contrary, government obligations in the form of options entail significant risk adjustment.     

Bond pricing with a surface of zero coupon yields

We present a new method for consistent cross‐sectional pricing of all traded bonds in the fixed income market. By applying thin plate regression splines ( Wood, 2003 ) to bootstrapped zero coupon bond yields ( Hagan and West, 2006 ), the method decomposes traded yields into a risk‐free component plus premia for credit and liquidity risks, where the decomposition is consistent with the market valuations and underlying cash flows of the bonds. We apply the framework to end of quarter yield data from 2008 to 2011 on Australian dollar denominated semi‐government, supranational and agency (SSA) bonds, and find that the surface provides an excellent fit to the underlying zero coupon yield curves. Further, the decomposition of selected yield time series and cross‐sections demonstrates how credit premia increased for Australian SSA bonds through the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), but were counterbalanced by liquidity discounts as investors sought safe haven securities.