EMU driven interest rate convergence has led to a significant reduction of borrowing costs for some European governments in the second half of the nineties. The paper deals with the possible consequences for deficit behaviour. Although the impact of interest rates on deficits is a crucial...

The confidence that financial markets are able to discipline the debt behaviour of governments is not very high. Therefore, the Stability and Growth Pact has been implemented as an institutional constraint to substitute for the market mechanism. With the weakening of the Pact, market discipline...

This paper examines the potential distortion of prices in the CDS market caused by too-big-to-fail. Overall, we find evidence for market discipline in the CDS market. However, CDS prices are distorted due to a size effect which arises when investors expect a public bail-out as a result of...

We investigate actual capital chosen by banks in presence of capital minimum requirements and ex-post penalties for violating them. The model yields excess capital that is always positive and increases during times of distress in the economy, which is in line with empirical evidence. Next, we...

This paper shows that the abolition of state guarantees to publicly owned banks in Germany resulted in an increase in funding costs at German savings banks. Rather than being the result of increased market discipline, the increase in funding costs is shown to be driven by spillover effects from...

Why does the market discipline that banks face seem too weak during good times and too strong during bad times? This paper shows that using rollover risk as a disciplining device is effective only if all banks face purely idiosyncratic risk. However, if banks' assets are correlated, a two-sided...

In this paper we investigate whether banks that borrow from other banks have lower risk levels. We concentrate on a large sample of Central and Eastern European banks which allows us to explore the impact of interbank lending when exposures are long-term and interbank borrowers are small banks....

The paper reviews and assesses our understanding of the notion of 'market discipline' in corporate governance. It questions the wholesale appeal to this notion in policy discussion, which fails to provide an account of the underlying mechanisms in terms of theory and empirical analysis....

Does a multilateral fiscal rule improve market discipline in a monetary union? This paper studies the impact of political events that systematically undermined the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) on EMU sovereign default risk for the period 2001 to 2005. For various EMU member countries our...

This paper studies the impact of political events that systematically undermined the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) on the euro's foreign exchange expectation bias for the period 2001 to 2005. Our findings suggest that euro foreign exchange markets were attentive to the political dispute over...