On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

The problem of governments’ over-indebtedness is one of the most important challenges for today’s EMU governance. As numbers suggest, the problem of extensive deficits has appeared in the EMU long before the burst of the global financial crisis. We suspect that the membership in a currency...

The Fisher effect states that in ation expectations should be re ected in nominal interest rates in a one-for-one manner to compensate for changes in the purchasing power of money. Despite its wide acceptance in theory, much of the empirical work fails to find favorable evidence. This paper...

In this paper, we estimate the determinants of the spreads between the 10-year sovereign bond yields and the (interest rate) swap rate for a sample of 22 OECD countries over the January 1999-December 2013 period, using various models. Our main, fixed-effect, model highlights the crucial role of...

Based on newly constructed prefectural land price data, we estimate long-run equilibrium relationships using a panel cointegration analysis, and then estimate an error-correction model (ECM) for land prices. The panel cointegration analysis reveals that the PVR cum price expectation can be...

This paper empirically examines the long-run impact and short-term dynamics of housing wealth and financial wealth on household consumption in South Africa using annual provincial-level panel data for the period 1995 to 2011. Based on available data, recently developed econometric techniques for...

We examine the impact of the first phase of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing (QE) programme during March 2009 to January 2010 on the UK government bond (gilt) market, using high-frequency disaggregated data on individual gilts. We find that: QE announcements took varying amounts of...

Analyses of credit spreads, i. e. the difference between the returns on corporate loans and on no-risk investments for periods equivalent in length, can provide useful information to both business managers and to external observers. In this article, fundamental determinants of such credit...

This paper aims at shedding some light on the mechanisms of pricing the EMU countries’ sovereign bonds in financial markets. Employing the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator, we find that major changes have occurred in terms of variables underlying sovereign risk. Since 2009, macroeconomic...

In the special collateral repo market, forward agreements are security-specific, which may magnify demand and supply effects. We quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the impact of security-specific demand and supply factors on the repo rates of all outstanding U.S....