Yield spreads over 10-year German government securities of the EU-15 countries converged dramatically in the seven years after the beginning of Monetary Integration. In this paper, we investigate the relative influence of systemic and idiosyncratic risk factors on their behaviour. Our...

With the beginning of the European Monetary Union (EMU), euro-area sovereign securities’ adjusted spreads over Germany (corrected from the foreign exchange risk) experienced an increase that caused a lower than expected decline in borrowing costs. The objective of this paper is to study what...

With European Monetary Union (EMU), there was an increase in the adjusted spreads (corrected from the foreign exchange risk) of euro participating countries’ sovereign securities over Germany and a decrease in those of non-euro countries. The objective of this paper is to study the reasons for...