The European Union made a number of steps not least of them the introduction of a common currency to foster the integration of the European financial markets. A number of papers have tried to gauge the degree of integration for various financial markets looking at the convergence of interest...

Differences in market structures may affect the manner in which fundamental information is incorporated into prices. High levels of quote and trade transparency plus substantial quoting obligations in European government securities markets ensure that prices are informationally efficient. The...

This study assesses the short and long-run behaviour of long-term sovereign bond yields in OECD countries, for the period 1973-2008. We employ a dynamic panel approach to reflect financial and economic integration, and to increase the performance and accuracy of the tests. Given the existence of...

The main objective of this paper is to study whether the introduction of the euro had an impact on the degree of integration of European Government bond markets. We adopt the CAPM-based model of Bekaert and Harvey (1995) to compare, from the beginning of Monetary Union until June 2008, the...

The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting...

From 2010 to 2012, the relation between bank stock returns from European Union (EU) countries and the returns on sovereign CDS of peripheral (GIIPS) countries is negative. We use days with tail sovereign CDS returns of peripheral countries to identify the effects of shocks to the cost of...

Using novel data on individual euro area banks' balance sheets this paper shows that exposure to stressed European sovereigns manifested in a liquidity shock to their international funding through two channels: (i) a contraction in cross-border funding, and (ii) a contraction in US wholesale...

The design of the euro area Quantitative Easing (QE) programme raises the question of whether insuficient liquidity in the bond markets will reduce the impact of the programme and lead to market volatility. While estimates suggests that scarcity of around €102 billion may arise over the life...

This paper analyzes sovereign risk shift-contagion, i.e. positive and significant changes in the propagation mechanisms, using bond yield spreads for the major eurozone countries. By emphasizing the use of two econometric approaches based on quantile regressions (standard quantile regression and...

This paper uses sovereign CDS spread changes and their volatilities as a proxy for the informational efficiency of the sovereign markets and persistency of country risks. Specifically, we apply semi-parametric and parametric methods to the sovereign CDSs of 10 eurozone countries to test the...