Does fiscal austerity influence sovereign debt spreads in a state-dependent manner? To investigate this, we develop an endogenous sovereign default model that incorporates long-maturity debt, fiscal rules, and investment. We uncover novel insights in the Greek default. First, our model provides...

We investigate the volatility dynamics of some major European Monetary Union sovereign bond markets. We provide an endogenous characterization in terms of two Markov switching regimes for market volatility and analyze the impact of some institutional sector imbalances and policy actions on the...

Debt mutualisation through Eurobonds has been proposed as a solution to the Euro crisis. Although this proposal found some support, it also attracted strong criticisms as it risks raising the spreads for strong countries, diluting legacy debt and promoting moral hazard by weak countries. Because...

This paper examines whether the Big Three credit rating agencies actually played as active a role in the Euro Crisis as previously asserted. On the basis of panel data methods for a set of 11 EMU countries, the analysis reveals significant evidence for an arbitrary markup on the GIPS group of...

This paper analyzes the causes of the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone and examines the policy alternatives confronting euro area governments. It suggests that pooling fiscal risks, creating an EU Treasury and issuing jointly-backed euro bonds is an optimal solution and the inevitable...

By adopting a dynamic ARDL transformation, we investigate the cointegrating relationship of the government bond debt yields, driven by the common money market factors in Economic Monetary Union. The findings indicate that the introduction of the common currency has not a uniform effect on the...

Sovereign debt crisis, domestic banks in fiscally stressed countries were considerably more likely than foreign banks to increase their holdings of domestic sovereign bonds in months with relatively high domestic sovereign bond issuance. This effect is stronger for state‐owned banks and for...

Using proprietary data on banks' monthly securities holdings, we show that during the European sovereign debt crisis, domestic banks in fiscally stressed countries were considerably more likely than foreign banks to increase their holdings of domestic sovereign bonds during months when the...

This paper studies the sovereign ratings of the current 19 euro area Member States from 2005 to 2015. It disentangles the rating drivers into a ‘fundamental' and ‘subjective' component using Moody's methodology, and explores which variables explain the ‘subjective' component, that is...

The euro-area sovereign debt crisis is receding. Europe is on a recovery path, growth is broad-based and unemployment is falling. One after the other, countries hit hardest by the crisis are exiting their adjustment programmes. However, debt remains high in most countries and future debt crises...