This paper examines the recent behavior of sovereign interest rates in the euro area, focusing on the 10 year yield spreads relative to Germany for Italy and other euro area countries. Both previous analyses and the new evidence presented in the paper suggest that, in recent months, for several...

This paper develops an arbitrage-free affine term structure model of potentially defaultable sovereign bonds to model a cross-section of eight euro area government bond yield curves since January 1999. The existence of a common monetary policy under European Monetary Union determines the short...

This paper develops an arbitrage-free affine term structure model of potentially defaultable sovereign bonds to model a cross-section of eight euro area government bond yield curves since January 1999. The existence of a common monetary policy under European Monetary Union determines the short...

There is a growing empirical literature studying whether fiscal rules reduce borrowing costs. 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,...

We introduce a methodology for measuring default risk connectedness that is based on an out-of-sample variance decomposition of model forecast errors. The out-of-sample nature of the procedure leads to "realized" measures which, in practice, respond more quickly to crisis occurrences than those...

This paper investigates the impact of Covid-19 pandemic and monetary policy measures adopted by the European Central Bank (ECB) on the sovereign risk for the European Monetary Union (EMU) countries for the period between March-2020 and November-2020 using daily data. The impact of Covid-19 and...

Austerity measures are frequently enacted when the sustainability of public finances is in doubt. Such doubts are reflected in high sovereign yield spreads and put further strain on government finances. Is austerity successful in restoring market confidence, bringing about a reduction in yield...

The current European Debt Crisis has led to a reinforced effort to identify the sources of risk and their influence on yields of European Government Bonds. Until now, the potentially nonlinear influence and the theoretical need for interactions reflecting flighttoquality and flight-to-liquidity...

Using a flexible threshold copula model, we investigate the pairwise tail dependence of Eurozone sovereign credit default swap spreads during the period 2008-2013 and we detect clusters of credit default swaps with high tail dependence. Our approach is also useful to inspect the evolution of the...