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 investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we make use of financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on...

In the literature regarding fiscal sustainability, the Domar condition and Bohn's condition are often used to check whether a government's debt situation is in a dangerous zone. This paper first shows that the Domar condition is obtained only from the government budget constraint (namely the...

We discuss the origins of the Greek financial crisis as manifested in the growing fiscal and current-account deficits since euro-area entry in 2001. We then provide an investigation of spreads on Greek relative to German long-term government debt. Using monthly data over the period 2000 to 2010,...

This book explores Portugal's response to the 2008 economic crisis and how the country regained the trust of the global capital markets through investor support. The experiences and successes of Portugal are compared with the other Eurozone countries, in particular Greece which had to negotiate...

1. The background -- 2. Roadmap, preparations -- 3. Investors -- 4. Managing the different ecosystems: the international press, the rating agencies and the domestic public opinion -- 5. Restarting the engines: first issuance -- 6. The road to normalization had its ups and downs. 7. The final...