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...

This paper studies spillovers across sovereign debt markets in the wake of sovereign rating changes. To this end, we use an extensive dataset covering all announcements by the three major agencies (Standard & Poor's, Moody's, Fitch) and daily sovereign bond market movements of up to 74 developed...