This paper presents a new approach for analysing the recent development of EMU sovereign bond spreads. Based on a GARCH-in-mean model originally used in the exchange rate target zone literature, spreads are decomposed into a risk premium, an expected loss component and a liquidity premium....

The present paper sheds further light on a well-known (alleged) violation of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure (EHT) - the frequent finding of unit roots in interest rate spreads. We show that the EHT implies (i) that the nonstationarity stems from the holding premium, which is...