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What is the direction and extent of the spillover effects of sovereign bond yields in the European Union and which countries are transmitters and receivers of these effects? The motivation for this research is related to the need to better understand the interconnectedness of European Union sovereign bond markets in the context of rising budget deficits and public debt, as well as recent financial and sovereign debt crises, which have highlighted the importance of bond market interdependencies. The main objective of the paper is to investigate the direction and magnitude of the spillover effects of sovereign bond yields in the European Union and to identify the states that act as transmitters and receivers of these effects. The data used in the analysis include the evolution of the bond markets of the euro area member states and non-monetary union states, to allow comparison and assessment of their interconnectivity. To analyse the interconnectedness of bond markets, methods which provide a suitable analysis framework to assess volatility propagation between countries were used. The research results highlight that most of the contagion effects are concentrated in the peripheral countries, such as Romania, Portugal, Lithuania and Ireland, and the central countries act as transmitters of these effects.

Macroeconomic expectations influence long-term output, investment, and employment through households’ behavior. Policymakers and politicians attempt to predict the behavior of citizens and voters. How individuals form expectations and perceive sovereign indebtedness brings into question public finance sustainability and incumbents’ credibility. Based on a cross-country survey in Central and Eastern European countries, we estimate several probit regressions to uncover the effects of economic knowledge on sovereign debt expectations. Robustness tests and additional control confirm the initial results. We find that knowledge about public debt increases the chances of forming negative expectations, while higher financial literacy tends to have the opposite effect. More specifically, individuals with higher public debt knowledge are 5.4 percentage points less likely to show positive expectations, while individuals with higher levels of financial literacy (interest rate and inflation knowledge) are approximately 3.5 percentage points more likely to form positive expectations. The results indicate that public debt expectations are driven by negative biases resulting from the lack of economic knowledge together with insufficiency in understanding economic causal mechanisms. Financial literacy programs could benefit from including information about macroeconomics in curricula. Improving individual abilities to understand macroeconomic mechanisms, including public debt, has the potential to influence expectations and shift behaviors towards desired policy outcomes.