Credit rating agencies are frequently criticized for producing sovereign ratings that do not accurately reflect the economic and political fundamentals of rated countries. This article discusses how the home country of rating agencies could affect rating decisions as a result of political...

The asset value of government has traditionally been seen as the accounting value of public assets. We develop a detailed financial economics view on sovereign asset values using market measures to arrive at implied sovereign asset values. We establish definition and dependencies within the...

On 4 March 2011, SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum and the National Bank of Poland jointly organised a conference on the theme of: "Monetary Policy after the Crisis". Following a call for papers with a large number of submissions, the scientific committee selected 9 papers, which...

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...

The recent increase of interest rate spreads in Europe and their apparent detachment from underlying fundamental variables has generated a debate on multiple equilibria in the sovereign bond market (see De Grauwe and Ji (2012)). We critically evaluate this hypothesis, by pointing towards an...

On 3 July 2015, SUERF organized its sixth joint conference with the Bank of Finland in Helsinki on the subject of liquidity and market efficiency. The one-day program consisted of an opening speech, six presentations, including three keynotes, and a lunchtime address. The present SUERF Study...

In recent years, the number of theoretical models on sovereign default exploded. I take a step back and investigate how good our current theoretical understanding of real world sovereign debt crisis really is. This is done by deriving implications that are hard wired into our models and...

In March 2013 around 130 participants from academia, banking and finance, governments and central banking gathered at the premises of the OeNB in Vienna for a conference jointly organized by the European Money and Finance Forum SUERF, the OeNB and the Austrian Society for Bank Research to...