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Alle drei großen Ratingagenturen Standard & Poor's, Moody's und Fitch haben Griechenland, Irland, Portugal und Spanien während der europäischen Finanzmarkt- und Staatsschuldenkrise signifikant benachteiligt. Dies lässt sich nur zu einem geringen Teil auf objektive Fundamentaldaten zurückführen. Das Reformziel der Ratingverordnung der Europäischen Union und auch des Ratinggesetzes der Großen Koalition, den Einfluss der Bonitätsbewertungen stark zu reduzieren, muss daher konsequent weiter verfolgt werden. The Big Three credit rating agencies put Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain at a significant disadvantage during the European sovereign debt crisis. Their strong influence is likely due to the importance given to credit ratings by financial regulations. Both the EU's credit rating directive and the Ratinggesetz of the German Bundestag assert that their objective is to markedly reduce this influence and allow for greater weight to be placed on fundamentals. They should pursue this objective vigorously.

Between 1986 and 2003 the Argentine risk premium was able to explain, almost alone, the Argentine business cycle. As time went by, the premium lost gradually its explanatory power till losing it all between 2011 and 2019. Meanwhile, a huge increase in public expenditure might have triggered a regime change. We investigate the loss of explanatory power of the Argentine premium and the emergence of the terms of trade and public expenditure as additional explanatory variables of the business cycle. And we attempt to answer two questions: why did the premium lose its power? and why did the Argentine economy stagnate between 2011 and 2019?

In the course of transition from planned economies to market economies, foreign direct investment played an important role and contributed to international economic integration in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper investigates the determinants of FDI in Central and Eastern Europe, a region which in large part still lacks strong institutions. The empirical analysis presented in this article fi nds evidence that country default risk is not necessarily a hindrance to FDI. In contrast, factors like market size, labour cost and trade liberalisation do matter for FDI engagement in the region.

Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht die Frage: Welche Absicherungs- und Finanzierungsinstrumente kennen Schweizer Exporteure und welche nutzen sie tatsächlich? Darüber hinaus werden auch Trends und Herausforderungen in der Absicherung und Finanzierung des grenzüberschreitenden Handels beleuchtet werden. Die Untersuchung basiert auf einer Befragung von 26 Exportunternehmen in der Deutsch- und Westschweiz.

The current complicated economic situation in Greece - and the rising political uncertainty that once again accompanies it - has important repercussions for growth, incomes, employment and the banking system in both the short and long term. The new Greek government is trying to perform a balancing act that will on the one hand satisfy its electorate and the more extreme fractions within the Syriza party and on the other hand offer a number of key concessions to the country's European partners. It is thus imperative to carefully select which concessions the EU should make towards the new government.

Früher spielten Länderrisiken meist nur bei der Betrachtung von Entwicklungsländern eine Rolle. Doch hat die jüngere Vergangenheit gezeigt, dass dieses Thema auch für die entwickelten Staaten von Bedeutung ist. So stufte beispielsweise die Ratingagentur Moody's die Kreditwürdigkeit Griechenlands am 14. Juni 2010 um vier Notches von A3 auf Ba1 herab. Dieser Downgrade gilt als Katalysator der europäischen Staatsschuldenkrise. Moody's begründete das Multi-Notch- Downgrade insbesondere mit dem erhöhten Risiko, dass sich die Schuldentragfähigkeit Griechenlands trotz des vereinbarten milliardenschweren Hilfspakets durch die Eurozone und den Internationalen Währungsfonds mittelfristig als nicht mehr nachhaltig erweisen könnte. Als sich die Verschuldung Griechenlands in Relation zum Bruttoinlandsprodukt (BIP) nicht stabilisierte, folgten weitere Downgrades der Ratingagentur. Die mehrfachen Ratingherabstufungen Griechenlands in den Jahren 2010 bis 2012 zeigen, dass das Rating von Staaten sehr sensitiv auf bestimmte Kennzahlen reagieren kann. Insbesondere die Überschreitung bestimmter Schwellenwerte kann sich schlagartig auf die Bonitätseinschätzung auswirken und zu einer entsprechenden Erhöhung der Länderrisikoprämien führen. Dass in Europa immer noch Handlungsbedarf hinsichtlich des Länderrisikos besteht, belegt der Vorschlag zur Reform des Euroraums einer Gruppe prominenter deutscher und französischer Ökonominnen und Ökonomen. Die Nachfrage nach Anleihen der bonitätsschwächeren Länder dürfte etwa durch die vorgeschlagenen Risikokonzentrationszuschläge ("sovereign concentration charges") reduziert werden. Ceteris paribus führt dies zu einem Anstieg der Länderrisikoprämien. In dieselbe Richtung zeigt die bankaufsichtliche Diskussion. Ein Wegfall der Privilegierung bei der (Null-) Risikogewichtung, die aktuell von allen in Basel involvierten Aufsehern praktiziert wird, liegt als Vorschlag auf dem Tisch. Hinzu kommt eine sich verstärkende Gefahrenlage durch sogenannte "nicht-kooperative Regierungen". Diese agieren bewusst gegen die Regelwerke ("Brüsseler Diktat") und damit länderrisikoerhöhend. Deshalb ist es bedeutsam, die Entwicklung der Ratings von Staaten abschätzen zu können. Insbesondere interessiert dabei der Übergang zwischen Investmentgrade und Subinvestmentgrade. In diesem Beitrag bestimmen wir die Determinanten der Ratingeinstufung von Staaten empirisch. Es wird zuerst ein Ordered Logit-Modell vorgestellt, mit welchem sich das Rating prognostizieren lässt. Dabei wird auf die Ratings von Moody's und die volkswirtschaftlichen Kennzahlen von Moody's und Fitch zurückgegriffen. Der Datensatz beinhaltet 124 von Moody's geratete Staaten. Danach wird der Fokus auf die Vorhersage eines (Sub-)Investmentgrade-Ratings gelegt, da dies eine zentrale Unterscheidung ist. Ein Logit-Modell tritt dabei gegen Deep Learning basierte Prognosemodelle an. Mit dem besten Modell wagen wir eine Vorausschau auf die zukünftige Bonität Italiens.

Staatliche Zahlungsausfälle haben nicht selten politische Ursachen. Während ökonomische Rahmenbedingungen wie etwa Wirtschaftswachstum, Finanzstabilität oder globale Investorenstimmungen die Zahlungsfähigkeit eines Staates beeinflussen, wird die tatsächliche Rückzahlung von Staatsschulden letztendlich von der einheimischen Regierung entschieden. Die Zahlungswilligkeit einer Regierung spielt daher eine entscheidende Rolle für das Risiko eines staatlichen Zahlungsausfalls. In diesem Artikel wird der Einfluss politischer Faktoren auf das staatliche Ausfallrisiko für 27 Schwellen- und Entwicklungsländer im Zeitraum von 1996 bis 2009 untersucht. Die Auswertung von Anleihedaten zeigt, dass Investoren ein höheres Ausfallrisiko fürchten, falls ein Land politisch instabil ist oder von einer Rechts- bzw. Linkspartei regiert wird. Der Einfluss politischer Faktoren auf das staatliche Ausfallrisiko eines Landes sinkt mit dessen Grad an Demokratie und Integration in die Weltwirtschaft.

Die Macht der Ratingagenturen wird derzeit allenthalben kritisiert. Tatsachlich haben ihre Beurteilungen eine grose Bedeutung bei der Kreditvergabe. Dies wurde aber vor allem durch zahlreiche Regularien vom Staat selbst verursacht. Dabei wirken sich die Landerratings aufgrund des „Sovereign-Ceiling“-Prinzips auch auf die Bewertung von Unternehmenskrediten aus.

Die vorliegende kumulative Dissertation besteht aus vier eigenständigen Beiträgen. Analyseschwerpunkt aller Beiträge sind Credit Default Swaps, kurz CDS, die insbesondere seit Beginn der Mitte 2007 einsetzenden Finanz-, Wirtschafts- und Staatenkrise zunehmend an Interesse gewonnen haben. Die Dissertation ist thematisch zweigeteilt. Der erste Themenkomplex fokussiert - auf Basis von CDS Spreads - die krisengetriebene Verflechtung von Banken und Staaten, den sogenannten Sovereign-Bank Nexus. Der zweite Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Analyse der Determinanten von Höhe und Veränderung von CDS Spreads wobei insbesondere das Risiko extremer Marktverwerfung sowie Liquiditätsrisiken analysiert werden.

Eine besondere Herausforderung bei grenzüberschreitenden Investitionen sind aus Sicht der investierenden Firmen die langfristigen Wirtschaftsbedingungen in den jeweiligen Zielländern: Rechtssicherheit, politische und wirtschaftliche Stabilität. Zumeist werden diese Faktoren in Form von Länderrisiken zusammengefasst. Auf der einen Seite haben Entwicklungs- und Schwellenländer große Potenziale. Zugleich aber zeichnen sich die entsprechenden Länder durch ein verhältnismäßig hohes Risiko aus. Zwischen 1989 und 2011 waren vor allem Länder, die mit weniger Risiko behaftet sind, Ziel des Großteils der deutschen Direktinvestitionen. Die vorliegenden Statistiken bestätigen zudem, dass Unternehmen aus dem produzierenden Gewerbe, wie z.B. die Automobilindustrie, in wachstumsstarke Ökonomien investieren.

The purpose of the essay is twofold: a) explore the ability of S. Huntington's model of political development for societies in process of modernization to explain the Argentine political history in 1880-1955; b) prove the hypothesis that mass pretorianism is inherently unstable. We conclude the evidence supports the Huntington's model. In other words, the model explains the changes that the political system underwent in the period, as much as the growing instability between the traditional civil order of 1862-1912 and the mass pretorian order of 1946-1955. Furthermore, we show that Argentine risk was high for mass pretorian orders and relatively low for civil orders and (radical and oligarchic) pretorian orders. It seems that the fiscal deficit plays an important role in connecting the political regime with Argentine risk.

The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state government indebtedness was low, and the crisis had no spillovers to the private sector. We show theoretically and empirically that these different debt experiences result from the interplay between differences in the ability of governments to interfere in private external debt contracts and differences in the flexibility of state fiscal institutions.

Die vorliegende kumulative Dissertation besteht aus vier eigenständigen Beiträgen. Analyseschwerpunkt aller Beiträge sind Credit Default Swaps, kurz CDS, die insbesondere seit Beginn der Mitte 2007 einsetzenden Finanz-, Wirtschafts- und Staatenkrise zunehmend an Interesse gewonnen haben. Die Dissertation ist thematisch zweigeteilt. Der erste Themenkomplex fokussiert - auf Basis von CDS Spreads - die krisengetriebene Verflechtung von Banken und Staaten, den sogenannten Sovereign-Bank Nexus. Der zweite Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Analyse der Determinanten von Höhe und Veränderung von CDS Spreads wobei insbesondere das Risiko extremer Marktverwerfung sowie Liquiditätsrisiken analysiert werden.

As governments and private companies from emerging markets have increasingly issued foreign-currency denominated debt through the 1990s, the economies concerned have become more vulnerable to abrupt changes in sovereign risk. At the same time, with closer economic integration countries have become more likely to be affected by economic problems that arise in neighboring countries. The following article uses the example of four Latin American countries to evaluate empirically the extent to which “contagion” explains changes in sovereign risk.

This study has investigated to which extent rating events influence sovereign bond yield spreads and overall financial market volatility. While rating agencies are part and parcel of today?s financial markets, the study succeeds in tracing some independent effect that ratings exert on financial market prices. First, our Granger causality test cautions against overestimating the independent longrun impact that sovereign credit ratings exert on the financial-market assessment of sovereign risk, however. The financial market and the two leading rating agencies appear broadly to share the same model in that assessment. As indicated by the explanatory power of the equations that underlie the causality test, dollar bond spreads and a set of default determinants seem to explain somewhat better the level of credit ratings than vice versa. The mutual interaction between sovereign yield spreads and ratings may be characterised by the nature of sovereign risk (requiring assessments on present and future willingness rather than only ability to pay), the information content of sovereign risk ratings (?contaminating? rating changes with other publicly-available news) and the industrial organisation of the rating industry (introducing an upward bias in sovereign ratings). Second, contrary to our expectations, our event studies find a highly significant announcement effect – obviously muted by strong market anticipation – when emerging-market sovereign bonds are put on review with negative outlook. The result may surprise, beyond the above considerations, because the rating of these bonds is fairly new to the industry; this lack of experience is reflected by a high degree of split ratings. Negative rating announcements seem also to be effective in the aftermath of rating deteriorations (possibly not fully captured by the length of our observation window), as investors are incited to reorient their portfolios. Positive rating events, by contrast, do not seem to have a significant announcement effect on dollar bond spreads. However, significant effects were found on changes in volatility levels of yield spreads and stock market returns. Third, these findings imply that the sovereign rating industry has the potential to help dampen excessive private capital inflows into the emerging markets with negative rating announcements. Positive announcements, by contrast, do not seem to exert a significant impact on sovereign risk assessments and thus are unlikely to add to the Harberger externality, even though they tend to reduce volatility in both bond and stock markets. For two reasons, even this conclusion must be cautioned however. The econometric analysis of rating decisions seems sensitive to the sample period chosen and the proxy variable for sovereign country risk. And even if rating agencies have the potential to dampen excessive inflows, our analysis does not provide information whether the agencies would provide negative rating announcements in time.

Eurobonds sind seit langem als Instrument zur Lösung der europäischen Staatsschuldenkrise in der Diskussion. Allerdings können sie in Hinblick auf Haftungsausdehnung, Umfang, Besicherung, Konditionierung und institutionell-rechtliche Formen sehr unterschiedlich ausgestaltet werden. Der Autor spricht sich aus ordnungspolitischen Gründen gegen Eurobonds aus und plädiert für die Einhaltung des marktwirtschaftlichen Haftungsprinzips auf nationaler Basis. This research focuses on the question of to what extent Eurobonds are feasible and which problems may arise in the political, economic and juridical areas. The contribution shows possible forms of the arrangement and discusses a justifi cation from the regulatory point of view. It also examines the extent to which Eurobonds have already become reality by the rescue aid of the European Union. The economic analysis demonstrates the interrelated benefi ts and problems, especially redistribution, misdirected incentives and misallocation of capital. Finally, establishing Eurobonds is the cornerstone of the political and normative question of which direction the Eurozone will or rather should move within the scope of the sovereign debt crisis.

Die EZB-Targetsalden der Mitgliedsländer der Europäischen Währungsunion haben sich im Verlauf der Schuldenkrise sehr unterschiedlich entwickelt. Vor allem Deutschland ist hier in eine Gläubigerposition geraten, während die Krisenländer hohe Defizite aufweisen. Der Autor untersucht hier nicht ihre fiskalischen (Haftungs-)Wirkungen, sondern ihre geld- und währungspolitischen Konsequenzen. The Target2 balances of the ESCB have become a focus of scholarly discussion. Triggered by a loss of international competitiveness and subsequent current account deficits in the EMU's periphery states, they now constitute a default risk for the core states. But there is more to it: balance of payment disequilibria in a currency union are supposed to trigger money supply flows from surplus countries to deficit countries. Since they form the basis for readjustments in relative prices and competitiveness, they must not be neutralised by monetary policy. The ECB's Target2 balances create precisely this neutralisation and thus undermine the self-adjusting mechanism of the EMU.

This paper argues that using gold as collateral for highly distressed bonds would bring great benefits to the euro area in terms of reduced financing costs and bridge-financing. It is mindful of the legal issues that this will raise and that such a suggestion will be highly controversial. However, a necessary condition is that the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) has agreed to the temporary transfer of the national central bank’s gold to a debt agency in full independence. This debt agency passes the gold along, in strict compliance with the prohibition of monetary debt financing. The paper also explains that gold has been used as collateral in the past and how a gold-backed bond might work and how it could lower yields in the context of the euro crisis. This move is then compared to the ECB’s now terminated Securities Market Programme (SMP) and its recently announced Outright Monetary Transactions (OMTs). Namely, a central bank using its balance sheet to lower yields of highly distressed countries where the monetary policy transmission mechanism is no longer working. Beyond some similarities between the moves, the specific benefits of using gold in this manner vis-a-vis the SMP and the OMTs are highlighted. For instance, there is by and large no transfer of credit risk between high risk/low risk countries, losses are borne by specific countries and not by the largest shareholders of the ECB, it would turn out to be more transparent, it would not be inflationary and would foster reforms.

The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation are substantially revised versions of the papers that were presented at the 2011 Madrid International Conference on “Risk Modelling and Management” (RMM2011). The papers cover the following topics: currency hedging strategies using dynamic multivariate GARCH, risk management of risk under the Basel Accord: A Bayesian approach to forecasting value-at-risk of VIX futures, fast clustering of GARCH processes via Gaussian mixture models, GFC-robust risk management under the Basel Accord using extreme value methodologies, volatility spillovers from the Chinese stock market to economic neighbours, a detailed comparison of Value-at-Risk estimates, the dynamics of BRICS's country risk ratings and domestic stock markets, U.S. stock market and oil price, forecasting value-at-risk with a duration-based POT method, and extreme market risk and extreme value theory.

This paper builds a model of sovereign debt in which default risk, interest rates, and debt depend not only on current fundamentals but also on news about future fundamentals. News shocks affect equilibrium outcomes because they contain information about the likelihood that the government repays its debt in the future. First, in the model with news shocks not all defaults occur in bad times, bringing the model closer to the data. Second, the news shocks help account for key differences between developing and more developed economies: as the precision of news improves, the model predicts lower variability of consumption, less countercyclical trade balance and interest rate spreads, as well as a higher level of debt more in line with the characteristics of more developed economies. Third, the model also captures the hump-shaped relationship between default rates and the precision of news obtained from the data. Finally, the news shocks have a nonmonotonic effect on the welfare.

This paper uses the rules of engineering as a rhetorical device to discuss why the international financial architecture needs a structured mechanism for dealing with sovereign insolvency. The paper suggests that the most important problem with the status-quo relates to delayed defaults and sketches a proposal aimed at mitigating this problem.

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different angles the complex interrelations between states and financial systems, which have developed in recent years with economic, financial and sovereign debt crises. While the contributions included here primarily look at fiscal policy and sovereign risk perspectives, papers on the monetary policy and regulatory perspectives, which were also dealt with at the Zürich Colloquium, will be published in SUERF Study 2012/3 “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy: Monetary Policy and Regulatory Perspectives”.

Bailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather weak stringency. Obstacles to testing this hypothesis include finding a measure of political importance that is not plagued by endogeneity and obtaining data on IMF conditionality. We propose to measure political importance using temporary membership on the United Nations Security Council and analyze a newly available dataset on the level of conditionality attached to (a maximum of) 314 IMF arrangements with 101 countries over the 1992 to 2008 period. We find a negative relationship: Security Council members receive about 30 percent fewer conditions. This suggests that the major shareholders of the IMF trade softer conditionality in return for political influence over the Security Council., KOF Working Papers, 338

We examine some of the macro-financial dimensions of sovereign risk and propose a conceptual framework that captures risks other than just the default risk. Morphed under a multi-dimensional notion of sovereign risk, we argue that the existing empirical methodologies to measure sovereign risk cover only partial aspects of sovereign risk and fail to capture its macro-financial dimensions. We highlight a menu of tools that could be used to tackle the broader notion of sovereign risk, and suggest that authorities should actively use them to manage the macro-financial dimensions of sovereign risk before those risks feed into the real economy.

We assess the role of financial linkages for the transmission of sovereign risk in the Euro crisis. Building on the narrative approach by Romer and Romer (1989, 2010) and augmented by Mertens and Ravn (2013), we use financial news to identify structural shocks in a vector autoregressive model of daily sovereign CDS premia for eleven European countries. To estimate how these shocks transmit across borders, we use data on cross-country bank exposures to sovereign debt. Our results indicate that cross-border financial exposures constitute important transmission channels: a reduction of exposure to overall Greek debt by one standard deviation is associated with a reduction in the response of the sovereign CDS to a shock to Greek sovereign risk by about three quarter in the average country. Decomposing these effects, we find that exposures to sovereign debt constitute significant transmission channels, while we find no robust support for transmission through bank-to-bank lending.

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of sovereign risk transferring to corporates and increasing their risk of default may be mitigated by legal institutions that provide strong property rights protection. Using a novel credit default swaps (CDS) data set covering government and corporate entities across thirty countries, we study both the average strength of the transfer risks and the role of institutions in mitigating such risks. We find that 1) sovereign risk on average has a statistically and economically significant influence on corporate credit risks (all else equal, a 100 basis point increase in the sovereign CDS spread leads to an increase in corporate CDS spreads of 71 basis points); 2) the sovereign-corporate relation varies across corporations, with state-owned companies exhibiting a stronger relation with the sovereign; and 3) the presence of strong property rights institutions, however, tends to weaken the connection. In contrast, contracting institutions (offering protection of creditor rights or minority shareholder rights) do not appear to matter much in this context.

This paper investigates contagion between bank risk and sovereign risk in Europe over the period 2006-2011. Since this period covers various stages of the banking and sovereign crisis, it offers a fertile ground to analyze bank/sovereign risk spillovers. We define contagion as excess correlation, i.e. correlation between banks and sovereigns over and above what is explained by common factors, using CDS spreads at the bank and at the sovereign level. Moreover, we investigate the determinants of contagion by analyzing bank-specific as well as country-specific variables and their interaction. We provide empirical evidence that various contagion channels are at work, including a strong home bias in bank bond portfolios, using the EBA’s disclosure of sovereign exposures of banks. We find that banks with a weak capital and/or funding position are particularly vulnerable to risk spillovers. At the country level, the debt ratio is the most important driver of contagion.

We find evidence that a significant part of the surge in the spreads of the PIGS countries in the Eurozone during 2010-11 was disconnected from underlying increases in the debt to Gdp ratios, and was the result of negative market sentiments that became very strong since the end of 2010. We also find evidence that after years of neglecting high government debt, investors became increasingly worried about this in the Eurozone, and reacted by raising the spreads. No such worries developed in stand-alone countries despite the fact that debt to Gdp ratios were equally high and increasing in these countries. We interpreted this evidence as validating the hypothesis firmulated in De Grauwe(2011) according to which government bond markets in a monetary union are more fragile and more susceptible to self-fulfilling liquidity crises than in stand-alone countries. We argue that the systematic mispricing of sovereign risk in the Eurozone intensifies macroeconomic instability, leading to bubbles in good years and excessive austerity in bad years.

Banking and sovereign risk in the euro area are highly correlated. This working paper sheds light on the link. We study the stock market performance and the holdings of government debt of the banks stress tested by the European Banking Authority in July and December 2011. Banks’ holdings of the sovereign bonds of vulnerable countries generally decreased during the period December 2010 to September 2011. The average stock market performance of each country’s banks was very uneven. The European Central Bank’s long-term refinancing operation (LTRO) had no material effect on banks’ stock market values in the countries under consideration. Greek debt holdings had an effect on banks’ market values in the period July to October 2011. After October, this effect disappeared. Holdings of Italian and Irish debt had a material effect on banks’ market value in the period October to December 2011. Holdings of debt of other periphery countries, in particular Spain, were not an issue. The July PSI deal did not substantially affect the risk resulting from holdings of debt other than Greek debt. The location of banks matters for their market value. This highlights the need to form a banking union in the euro area.

Bei der Kritik an den Rating-Agenturen wird häufig missachtet, dass ihre Macht weitgehend politikgemacht ist. Es sind der Staat und die EZB, die über Gesetze und Regulierungen den Ratings eine Multiplikatorwirkung zuschreiben. Dieser Beitrag skizziert anhand der Länder-ratings die einschlägigen Wirkungskanäle.

Die Finanzmarkte reagieren in der gegenwartigen Staatsschuldenkrise offensichtlich auf Meinungsauserungen der marktbeherrschenden Ratingagenturen — selbst wenn diese in scheinbarem Widerspruch zur vorherigen Bewertung okonomischer Fundamentaldaten stehen. Das fuhrt dazu, dass private Interessen staatliche Verschuldungsdynamiken beeinfl ussen konnen und fur sie damit politischer Handlungsspielraum entsteht.

With a unique data set summarizing the quality of rules-based fiscal governance in EU member states, we show that stronger fiscal rules in euro area members reduce sovereign risk premia, in particular in times of market stress. To do so, we develop a model of sovereign spreads that are determined by the probability of default in interaction with the level of risk aversion. Estimation of the model con firms the central predictions. The legal base of the rules and their enforcement mechanisms are the most important dimensions of rules-based fiscal governance.

We examine monetary policy options for a small open economy where sovereign default might occur due to intertemporal insolvency. Under interest rate policy and floating exchange rates the equilibrium is indetermined. Under a fixed exchange rate the equilibrium is uniquely determined and independent of sovereign default., Discussion Paper / SFB 823 ; 07/2011

Die Verdichtung von Informationen zu einer Kennzahl scheint praktisch: Sie erleichtert den globalen Vergleich verschiedener Lander. Aus der Positionierung innerhalb eines Rankings werden wirtschaftspolitische Empfehlungen abgeleitet. Der Politik wird signalisiert, genau an den Einzelkennziffern zu drehen, die im jeweiligen Ranking enthalten sind. Welche Vor- und Nachteile mit Indikatoren und Indikatorensystemen verbunden sind, diskutierten die Autoren im Rahmen der Panelsitzung, die der Wirtschaftsdienst anlasslich der Jahrestagung des Vereins fur Socialpolitik 2011 organisiert hat.

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) have not consistently met the expectations placed on them by investors and policymakers. It is difficult, however, to improve the quality of ratings through regulatory initiatives. In the short term, changes to the CRAs' regulatory environment, in a context of high market uncertainty, may add to market stress. The role of credit ratings in regulation should be reduced but eliminating it entirely would have significant downsides, at least in the short term. The transfer of ratings responsibility to public authorities, including the European Central Bank, is unlikely to be a good alternative because of inherent conflicts of interest. The notion of risk-free sovereign bonds is challenged by the crisis, but the most straightforward way to address this challenge in the euro-area context would be the establishment of a euro-area-wide sovereign bond instrument. This Policy Contribution was prepared as a briefing paper for the European Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee's Monetary Dialogue.

In this paper we test whether the co-movement of sovereign CDS premia increased significantly after the Greek debt crisis started in October 2009. We perform a bivariate test for contagion that is based on an approach proposed by Forbes and Rigobon (2002). Our sample consists of daily data between October 2008 and July 2010 for 39 countries including both emerging and industrialized countries. Our results indicate that there were periods of contagion for CDS markets during the Greek debt crisis, which is in contrast to the results from Forbes and Rigobon (2002) for equity markets after the Hong Kong crash and their conclusion of “no contagion, only interdependence”. Especially for European countries we would instead conclude “both contagion and interdependence”.

Since the beginning of 2010, the Euro Area faces a severe sovereign debt crisis, now generally known as the Euro Crisis. While the Euro Crisis has its origin in Greece, problems have now spread to several other European countries as well. Dynamic conditional correlation models (DCC) are estimated in order to assess if contagious effects are identifiable during the Euro Crisis, or if the countries' problems are instead due to fundamental problems in the affected economies. Our findings show that there is contagion within the Euro Area. Additionally, contagious effects generated by rating announcements are documented. These results are crucial when it comes to choosing the correct measure and timing of policy intervention.

In this paper we do a couple of things: discussing a way to measure the welfare cost of country risk, and measuring it for Argentina in the period 1875-2006. There are two conclusions: a) the welfare cost of Argentine risk has been huge: for example, in the period 1976-2006 it was around 20% of GDP, several times larger than the welfare cost of any conventional distortion; b) this cost would be wholly paid by labor. These fascinating results deserve further investigation.

This paper examines the spillover effects of sovereign rating news on European financial markets during the period 2007-2010. Our main finding is that sovereign rating downgrades have statistically and economically significant spillover effects both across countries and financial markets. The sign and magnitude of the spillover effects depend both on the type of announcements, the source country experiencing the downgrade and the rating agency from which the announcements originates. However, we also find evidence that downgrades to near speculative grade ratings for relatively large economies such as Greece have a systematic spillover effects. Rating-based triggers may help explain these results.

In this paper, we study the effects of US target rate changes and related communications by members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on spreads for emerging market sovereign credit default swaps (CDS). Using GARCH models, we find that during the pre-financial crisis sub-sample (April 2002-July 2007) CDS spreads react more to country-specific factors than to US monetary policy news. This finding is reversed during the financial crisis sub-sample (August 2007-December 2009), when US monetary policy actions and communications affect CDS spreads in a notable way. Finally, our analysis suggests that CDS spreads became more prone to spillover effects during the financial crisis.

This paper provides evidence for a significant relation between international financial markets' integration and output volatility. In the framework of a threshold model, it is shown empirically that this relation depends on country's financial risk. Financial risk indicates a country's ability to pay its official, commercial and trade debts. In countries with low financial risk, financial openness decreases output volatility, while, in countries with high financial risk, financial openness increases output volatility. Extensive robustness checks confirm this result.

We study the determinants of sovereign bond spreads in the euro area since the introduction of the euro. We show that an aggregate risk factor is a main driver of spreads. This factor also plays an important indirect role for risk spreads through its interaction with the size and structure of national banking sectors. When aggregate risk increases, countries with large banking sectors and low equity ratios in the banking sector experience greater widening in yield spreads, suggesting that financial markets perceive a larger risk that governments will have to rescue banks, increasing public debt and therefore sovereign risk. Moreover, government debt levels and forecasts of future fiscal deficits are also significant determinants of sovereign spreads.

After neutering the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) in 2005, recent developments pinpoint that financial markets considerably discriminate between qualities of European governmental borrowers. In this article we inquire whether and to what extent political statements and decisions within the realm of the Europe an Union (EU) have deteriorated the effectiveness of the SGP from financial markets’ perspective. The SGP may represent a focal point in financial market actors’ calculus regarding long-term public debt formation. Accordingly, any news – such as political rhetoric in context of the SGP – affects financial market actors’ evaluation concerning governmental creditworthiness. We use financial market data to measure the influence that political events exert on governmental default risks. Using daily data for the EMU memberstates from 2002 to 2005 the analysis reveals that political rhetoric has considerably undermined the efficacy of the SGP. In turn, market forces have regained some more momentum. According policy implications are outlined.

We investigate whether elected members of the United Nations Security Council receive favorable treatment from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), analyzing panel data on the level of conditionality attached to (a maximum of) 314 IMF arrangements with 101 countries over the period of 1992 to 2008. We find a negative relationship: Security Council members receive about 30 percent fewer conditions attached to the loans that they receive from the IMF. We conclude that conditionality is softer for these countries because the major shareholders of the IMF desire influence over the Security Council., KOF Working Papers, 262

This paper assesses the role of sovereign risk in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in Turkey. We estimate two versions of a simple New Keynesian small open economy model on quarterly data for the period 1994Q3-2008Q2: A basic version and a version augmented by a default premium on government debt due to a perceived risk of sovereign debt default. Model comparisons clearly support the augmented version since it leads to stronger internal propagation and hence smaller shocks are required in order to reconcile the observed dynamics of nominal and real variables, leading to better forecasting performance. The estimated default probability is highly debt-elastic, indicating that default fears are a relevant concern. The results suggest that the augmented model may lead to a better understanding of macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging market economies that are subject to sovereign risk. In terms of policy implications, counterfactual experiments show that both more active monetary policy and stronger fiscal feedbacks from debt on taxes can lead to less volatile inflation and debt dynamics, but higher debt feedbacks on taxation additionally reduce expected default rates. JEL classification: E10; E30; E63; H30, Discussion Paper / SFB 823 ; 49/2010

The potential mutation of the Sub-Prime banking crisis into a sovereign debt one in Euro area countries is investigated. After reviewing the criteria used to measure the debt vulnerability, the balance sheet approach (BSA) is presented in order to illustrate the potential connections between these two types of crises. A graphical analysis yields evidence that at the end 2009 the probability of observing a Euro area country defaulting is less likely than six month before. Nevertheless, the serious threats, which concern Greece and Ireland, do not permit us to exclude the occurrence of a contagious, or self-fulfilling, sovereign debt or currency crises in Euro area in the future.

This paper offers a theory of conditionality lending in 19th century international capital markets. We argue that ownership of reputation signals by prestigious banks rendered them able and willing to monitor government borrowing. Monitoring was a source of rent, and it led bankers to support countries facing liquidity crises in a manner similar to modern descriptions of relationship lending to corporate clients by parent banks. Prestigious bankers' ability to implement conditionality loans and monitor countries' financial policies also enabled them to deal with solvency. We find that, compared with prestigious bankers, bondholders' committees had neither the tools nor the prestige required for effectively dealing with defaulters. Hence such committees were far less important than previous research has claimed.

The paper holds that the country risk premium is the triggering factor of the business cycle in a small, financially open and highly volatile economy like that of Argentina. A rise of the premium determines a capital outflow, an aggregate demand contraction and a recession; a fall of the premium determines a capital inflow, an aggregate demand expansion and a boom. We build a model where country risk plays a central role in macroeconomic equilibrium. We evaluate the empirical relationship between country risk and GDP, consumption, investment, and the current account balance. We compare our country-risk model with those of various schools of macroeconomic thought. Main conclusions are: a) Country-risk perceptions of foreign and local investors determine the fraction of world income they like to spend in the small country and the country's GDP adjusts passively to that fraction. b) Country risk causes a sort of labor unemployment that resembles involuntary unemployment. c) Openness softens the impact of a rise in country risk. d) Argentine time series for the period 1985-97 show a strong negative correlation between country risk and those aggregate variables, with causality going from the former to the latter.