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The group report analyses the joint impact of Momentum, Value, Size, and Low Volatility in factor-based investing in sovereign bond emerging and developed markets, develops an ESG factor, and assesses its effects across several strategies. This individual report focuses on a Size approach and finds that the total value of government debt can be used to achieve higher risk-adjusted returns. Across the 13 years of data, the results show that ESG scores have little impact on top of the Size factor. This new integrated approach to sovereign bond markets adds to the recent and increasing literature on ESG investing.

The group report analyses the joint impact of Momentum, Value, Size, and Low-Volatility in factor-based investing in sovereign bond emerging and developed markets, develops an ESG factor and assesses its effect across all strategies. This paper focuses on a low-volatility strategy, with volatility being measured as the standard deviation of the yield-to-maturity, and finds that controlling for credit risk and interest rate risk is fundamental to apply it. Results show that the integration of the ESG factor complements the low-volatility strategy and produces higher risk-adjusted returns.

As the economic disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic increased in March 2020, there was a global dash-for-cash by investors. This selling pressure occurred across advanced sovereign bond markets and caused a deterioration in market functioning, leading to central bank interventions. We show that these market disruptions occurred disproportionately in the U.S. Treasury market and were due to investors' selling pressures being far more pronounced and broad-based. Furthermore, we assess differences in key drivers of the market disruptions across sovereign bond markets, based on an analysis of the data as well as structured outreach to a range of market participants.

This paper analyzes whether realized higher moments are able to predict out-of-sample sovereign bond returns using high-frequency data from the European bond market. We study bond return predictability over tranquil and crisis periods and across core and periphery markets at the index and country level. We provide fresh evidence that realized kurtosis is the dominant predictor of subsequent returns among higher moments and other predictors such as CDS spreads, short-term interest rates and implied stock market volatility. Our findings further underline that sovereign bond return predictability is stronger during crisis periods and more pronounced for bonds of lower credit ratings. University College Dublin

Using daily data from 2002-2020, this study tests for contagion in the Eurozone using a binary stress indicator for extreme occurrences of sovereign bond yields. Contagion is evaluated by the significance of a country’s stress indicator in explaining other countries’ stress periods, controlling for push and pull factors in order to disentangle contagion from interdependence, and following Sala-i-Martin (1997) to obtain robust results. We find evidence of contagion, albeit diverging from the well-documented Eurozone core-periphery dichotomy, with relationships normutual nor exclusive. We find that Greece’s impact is not as widespread as expected, whileItaly’s gains traction across crises, alluding to “wake-up call” contagion.

The paper provides a high-frequency analysis of liquidity dynamics in the eurozone sovereign bond market over tranquil and crisis periods. We study time series of liquidity across the yield curve using high-frequency data from MTS, one of Europe’s leading electronic fixed-income trading platforms. We document flight-to-liquidity effects as investors prefer to trade on shorter-term benchmarks during liquidity dry-ups. We provide evidence of significant commonalities in spread and depth liquidity proxies which are weaker during the crisis period for both core and periphery economies although periphery countries display higher commonality than core countries during the crisis. We show that illiquidity of the periphery countries plays an important role in market dynamics and Granger causes illiquidity, volatility, returns, and CDS spreads across the maturity spectrum in both calm and crisis periods. Liquidity is priced both as a characteristic and as a risk factor even when controlling for credit risk, pointing to liquidity’s systematic dimension and importance. Science Foundation Ireland University College Dublin New York University (NYU) Tandon’s Finance and Risk Engineering

National audience; This paper aims to evaluate the specific role of volatility and co-volatility risks in the formation of long-term European interest rates over the crisis and post-crisis periods with an active role of the ECB. We propose for that a portfolio choice model with two countries, which generalizes the results of the traditional theory of the term structure of interest rates. Long-term equilibrium rates depend crucially on the covariances between international bond yields anticipated by investors. Positively anticipated covariances amplify the phenomena of fundamentals contagions related to the degradations of public finance debt issuer, while negatively anticipated covariances amplify the phenomena of flight to quality. The econometric approach over the period January 2006 to September 2016 analyses 21 European market pairs in a bivariate GARCH framework. We obtain three important results. 1) The decline of German and French long-term rates very early in the crisis, since March 2011, found a strong support in the reduction in the anticipated covariances towards the peripheral countries, which really amplified the process of flight to quality. 2) The volatility risk premium mechanism on portfolios and bond yields declines sharply during the crisis, and reappears later over the post-OMT period. Everything happens as if the mechanism of international bond portfolio allocation had ceased during the sovereign debt crisis and then reappeared. 3) Acccording to a test a la Forbes and Rigobon [2002], it seems difficult to affirm that QE programmes have led to a significant increase on correlations between bond markets, simply because the correlations were already high before the implementation of QE, particularly since the implementation of the OMT.

With a view to establishing a Capital Markets Union (CMU), efforts to integrate (private) capital markets and private risk-sharing in the European Union are underway. However, the single (capital) market will be burdened by a perennial potential threat to sovereign bond market stability in the euro area; these markets had disintegrated during the "euro crisis". While several reforms related to the institutional architecture of the euro area, such as major parts of the banking union, have been implemented successfully, the eminent design feature of the euro area that nourishes fragmentation and flight to safety is not sufficiently fixed: With the adoption of the euro, Member States became ‘subsidiary governments' that were no longer capable of issuing bonds under their own exclusive monetary control. Thus, integrating euro area sovereign bond markets should be a top priority. One remedy would be to pool sovereignty via euro bonds, or, given the reluctance to embrace risk-sharing among sovereigns, to introduce synthetic euro bonds that work without debt mutualization. Mit dem Ziel einer Kapitalmarktunion sind Bestrebungen im Gange, (private) Kapitalmärkte zu integrieren sowie private Risiken in der Europäischen Union zu teilen. Zu beachten ist, dass der Binnen(kapital)markt durch eine latente Instabilität der Staatsanleihenmärkte im Euroraum bedroht ist, zumal diese Märkte sich während der "Euro-Krise" desintegriert hatten. Zwar wurden Reformen der institutionellen Architektur des Euro-Währungsgebiets, wie etwa große Teile der Bankenunion, erfolgreich umgesetzt; jedoch sind jene Aspekte des Euroraums, die Fragmentierung und Flucht nach Sicherheit bewirken, nicht hinlänglich repariert. Mit der Einführung der Gemeinschaftswährung wurden die Mitgliedstaaten zu "subsidiären Regierungen", die keine Staatsanleihen mehr unter ihrer alleinigen "monetären Kontrolle" emittieren können. Integration der Staatsanleihenmärkte im Euroraum sollte daher oberste Priorität erhalten. Eine Möglichkeit wäre, die Souveränität über Euro-Anleihen zu poolen. Alternativ dazu ließen sich, angesichts der Skepsis gegenüber einer Risikoteilung zwischen Mitgliedsstaaten, synthetische Euro-Anleihen einführen, die keine Vergemeinschaftung von Schulden mit sich bringen.

The aim of this paper is to apply the spillover index methodology developed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012) to investigate the role individual sovereign bond markets play in international sovereign bond market volatility spillovers. Daily data for 19 developed and developing countries from four continents is used in order to estimate fixed and time-varying return and volatility spillovers index for sovereign bond markets during post-Lehman Brothers bankruptcy period. In addition, we decompose the overall sovereign bond markets return and volatility spillover index into specific country-to- country spillovers to detect individual countries that explain the majority of detected spillovers. We find that innovations to the US sovereign bond market have the biggest influence on the return and volatility variance in other sovereign bond markets across the globe. In addition, spillovers are more intensive for the sovereign bond returns than for volatilities in the observed period. European debt crisis seem to be the cause of surges in return and volatility spillover in the observed period.

We analyse the impact of stakeholder interactions with the market as a consequence of the negative interest rate regime on the pricing of selected Floating-rate notes (FRNs). The range of reactivity of financial markets and issuers to uncertainty caused by an untested boilerplate term in bond contracts are thoroughly outlined. The subject clause stipulates 'not applicable' as the minimum rate of interest, which raises confusion regarding payment obligations between issuers and investors. This is discussed from a legal perspective. Empirically, we find that markets do---to varying degrees---price stakeholder activities like court decisions, industry association statements, and public positions of sovereigns. In turn, issuers are willing to react to legal risks quickly, if costs of inertia are low. This is reflected also in the significant changes in the FRN issuance structure in the past few years. The announcement of further lower for longer rates in the Euro Area provides evidence that the FRN market appreciates the current protection of negative coupons even under a lower Euribor.

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. We argue that the case for the existence of some deterministic force that condemns countries in the periphery to stay in the periphery indefinitely, is weak. Countries that are in the periphery today can become part of the core and vice versa. We also argue that the long run success of the Eurozone depends on a continuing process of political unification. Political unification is needed because the Eurozone has dramatically weakened the power and legitimacy of nation states without creating a nation at the European level. This is particularly true in the field of stabilization. The political willingness to go in this direction, however, is non-existent today. There is no willingness to provide a common insurance mechanism that would put taxpayers in one country at risk of having to transfer money to other countries. Under those conditions the sovereign bond markets in the Eurozone will continue to be prone to instability. ispartof: ECONOMISTS VOICE vol:15 issue:1 status: published

The global integration of the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs’) sovereign bond markets was investigated in this paper. Summarizing the results of this study it can be stated that the global and regional integration of the CEECs sovereign bond markets is stronger in terms of sovereign bond CDS spreads volatilities comparing the sovereign bond CDS spreads changes and regional integration of CEECs bond markets is higher than global integration.

This thesis focuses on some critical issues of the access to international financial markets in developing and emerging market economies. The first part provides a general overview of the macroeconomic consequences of one of the most market-friendly monetary policy regime—inflation targeting—using a meta-regression analysis framework. The second part analyses government bond market risk and stability. The last part investigates the disciplining effects of government bond market participation—bond vigilantes. In Chapter 1, the results indicate that the literature of the macroeconomic effects of inflation targeting adoption is subject to publication bias. After purging the publication bias, the true effect of inflation targeting appears to be statistically and economically meaningful both on the level of inflation and the volatility of economic growth, but not statistically significant on inflation volatility or real GDP growth. Third, differences in the impact of inflation targeting found in primary studies can be explained by differences in studies characteristics including the sample characteristics, the empirical identification strategies, the choice of the control variables, inflation targeting implementation parameters, as well as the study period and some parameters related to the publication process. Chapter 2 shows that the adoption of inflation targeting regime reduces sovereign debt risk in emerging countries. However, this relative advantage of inflation targeting—compared to money or exchange rate targeting—varies systematically depending on the business cycle, the fiscal policy stance, the level of development, and the duration of countries’ experience with inflation targeting. Chapter 3 shows that remittances inflows significantly reduce bond spreads, whereas development aid does not. It also highlights that the effect of remittances on spreads arises in a regimes of lower developed financial system, higher degree of trade openness, lower fiscal space, and exclusively in non-remittances dependent regimes. Chapter 4 indicates that countries with credit default swaps contracts on their debts have a higher probability of experiencing a debt crisis, compared to countries without credit default swaps contracts. It also finds that the impact of credit default swaps initiation is sensitive to several structural characteristics including the level of economic development, the country creditworthiness at the timing of credit default swaps introduction, the public sector transparency, the central bank independence; and to the duration of countries’ experiences with credit default swaps transactions. Chapter 5 shows that bond markets participation encourages government in developing countries to increase their domestic tax revenue mobilization. Finally, it finds that bond markets participation improves the mobilization of internal taxes, compared to tax on international trade, and reduces their instability. Chapter 6 shows that the presence of domestic bond markets significantly reduces financial dollarization in domestic bond markets countries. This effect is larger for inflation targeting countries compared to non-inflation targeting countries, is apparent exclusively in a non-pegged exchange rate regime, and is larger when there is a fiscal rule that constrains the conduct of fiscal policy. Finally, it finds that the induced drop in inflation rate and its variability, nominal exchange rate variability, and seigniorage revenue are potential transmission mechanisms through which the presence of domestic bond markets reduces financial dollarization in domestic bond markets countries.; Cette thèse s'intéresse aux questions d'accès aux marchés financiers dans les économies émergentes et en développement. La première partie donne un aperçu général des conséquences macroéconomiques de l'un des régimes de politique monétaire le plus favorable au marché - le ciblage d'inflation - en utilisant le cadre d'analyse de la méta-analyse. La deuxième partie analyse le risque et la stabilité des marchés obligataires des États. La troisième et dernière partie examine les effets disciplinaires résultant de la participation aux marchés obligataires souverains. Plusieurs résultats émergent. Au chapitre 1, les résultats indiquent que la littérature sur les effets macroéconomiques du ciblage d'inflation est sujette à des biais de publication. Après avoir purgé ces biais, le véritable effet du ciblage d'inflation reste statistiquement et économiquement significatif à la fois sur le niveau de l'inflation et la volatilité de la croissance économique, mais ne l’est pas sur la volatilité de l'inflation ou le taux de croissance économique réel. Aussi, les caractéristiques des études déterminent l’hétérogénéité des résultats de l'impact du ciblage d’inflation dans les études primaires. Le chapitre 2 montre que l'adoption d'un régime de ciblage d'inflation réduit le risque souverain dans les pays émergents. Cependant, cet effet varie systématiquement en fonction du cycle économique, de la politique budgétaire suivie, du niveau de développement et de la durée dans le ciblage. Le chapitre 3 montre que les envois de fonds des migrants, contrairement aux flux d'aide au développement, permettent de réduire le risque souverain. Cette réduction est plus marquée dans un pays avec un système financier moins développé, un degré d'ouverture commerciale élevé, un espace budgétaire faible et sans effet dans les pays dépendants des envois de fonds. Le chapitre 4 montre que les pays ayant des contrats d’échange sur risque de crédit sur leurs dettes sont plus sujets à des crises de dette. Il constate également que cet effet reste sensible aux caractéristiques structurelles des pays. Le chapitre 5 montre que la participation aux marchés obligataires de long terme (domestiques et internationaux) encourage les gouvernements des pays en développement à accroître leurs recettes fiscales intérieures. Il révèle également que l'effet favorable dépend du niveau des recettes de seigneuriage, d’endettement, du régime de change, du niveau de développement économique, du degré d’ouverture financière, et du développement financier. Le chapitre 6 montre que la présence de marchés obligataires domestiques, de long terme et liquides réduit considérablement le degré de dollarisation financière dans les pays en développement. Cet effet est plus important dans les pays avec un régime monétaire de ciblage d’inflation ou de change flottant, et à règles budgétaires. Enfin, il constate que la présence de marchés obligataires domestiques réduit la dollarisation financière à travers la baisse du niveau et de la variabilité de l'inflation, de la variabilité du taux de change nominal, et des revenus de seigneuriage.

This paper examines nonlinear spillover effects between sovereign bond markets of six euro area countries (France, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Spain), four of which were among the hardest hit by the sovereign debt crisis, by applying a nonlinear Granger causality test of Diks and Panchenko (2006). The test is applied on the sovereign bond yield dynamics (i.e. yield changes) time series for the time period from 3 January 2000 - 31 August 2011. We also test for ˝pure˝ spillovers between sovereign bond yield dynamics, i.e. the spillovers after controlling for common and regional factors that impact the sovereign bond yield changes of all countries simultaneously. To verify if the nature of spillovers has changed after the start of the euro are sovereign debt crisis, we test for the nonlinear spillovers for the whole observed period and separately for the period be fore and after the start of the euro area sovereign debt crisis (period from the start of April 2010 until the end of our sample, i.e. 31 August 2011). The results of our study show that strong bi-directional Granger causality exists between the investigated sovereign bond markets. Very similar results are obtained whether the regional and world factors are or are not controlled for. We find strong bi-directional non-linear Granger causality for the investigated euro area countries prior the euro area sovereign debt crisis. After the start of the euro area sovereign debt crisis the interdependence be- tween the markets has reduced. We can no longer detect non-linear spillovers running from Germany and France to the ˝periphery˝ euro area countries. The findings of this study have important implications for the policymakers as they show that shocks spill-over quickly across the sovereign bond markets and the intensity and nature of spillovers can change throughout time. The sovereign bond markets of the ˝core˝ euro area decoupled from the ˝periphery˝ euro area sovereign bond markets after the start of euro are debt crisis. The findings are also of relevance for individual investors in the sovereign bond markets for the purpose of portfolio diversification.

We use data for 24 European countries, spanning from 1994 to 2015, in order to examine how changes in macroeconomic conditions influence the country’s risk premium volatility proxied by sovereign spreads variance. In the first part of the empirical analysis we estimate the univariate generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model in order to obtain the conditional variance of sovereign bond spreads. We show that the increase of this variance coincides with economic and financial crisis occurring either in the country or globally. In the second part of the empirical analysis we estimate panel vector autoregression (panel VAR) model in order to model the interplay among macroeconomic fundamentals (inflation, output gap, public debt and interest rates) and the country´s risk premium volatility. We show that overheating of the economy, along with the unexpected increase in public debt, inflation and interest rates increase the country´s risk premium volatility. We also show that sudden increase in country´s risk premium volatility depresses the economy, exerts deflationary pressures on consumer prices, and is followed by strong and permanent increase in public debt.

JEL no: F36, F45 The Economic and Monetary Union was an advance stage towards a complete integration across European countries. We are interested in understand to what extent the common currency has contributed to strengthen the co-movement between Euro area countries. Ehrmann et al.(2011) study convergence by looking at the sovereign bond markets. The authors consider the four Eurozone largest economies, for three different maturities and using high-frequency data. This dissertation extends their research through an updated dataset. As expected we obtain the exact same results for the period we have in common - strong convergence with Euro’s introduction. After 2008, the picture changes dramatically. We see a great divergence, which seems to be triggered during the European sovereign debt crisis. This path is reversed in the last part of our dataset, however, the market integration never return to the level experienced during the first nine years of EMU. We innovate this field of analyses through the introduction of a univariate analyses. We conclude that the convergence patterns detected in the zero-coupon yields are to a large extent structural. The great divergence observed after the crisis gave rise to a striking tendency - the formation of two country blocks within the EMU. We discuss possible reasons behind the convergence dynamics observed in the sovereign bond markets and, future implications for the European complete integration goal. A Uni˜ao Econ´omica e Monet´aria foi um est´agio avanc¸ado no sentido de uma integrac¸ ˜ao completa entre os pa´ıses europeus. Estamos interessados em perceber em que medida a moeda comum contribui para o fortalecimento de um movimento concertado entre os pa´ıses da ´area do euro. Ehrmann et al. (2011) estuda a convergˆencia, focando-se no mercado de obrigac¸ ˜oes soberanas. Esta dissertac¸ ˜ao estende sua investigac¸ ˜ao atrav´es da actualizac¸ ˜ao dos dados. Como esperado, obtemos resultados coincidentes para os per´ıodos que temos em comum - forte converg ˆencia depois da introduc¸ ˜ao do Euro. Depois de 2008, o quadro altera-se drasticamente. Encontramos uma divergˆencia significativa que parece ser desencadeada durante a crise das d´ıvidas soberanas europeias. Este fen´omeno ´e revertido na etapa final contemplada pela nossa amostra, no entanto, a integrac¸ ˜ao experienciada durante os primeiros anos da UEM n˜ao volta a acontecer. Com recurso a uma an´alise univariada verificamos que os padr˜oes de convergˆencia detectados nas yields das obrigac¸ ˜oes de cup˜ao-zero s˜ao de facto alterac¸ ˜oes com fundamentos estruturais. A grande divergˆencia observada ap´os a crise deu origem a uma tendˆencia marcante - a formac¸ ˜ao de dois blocos de pa´ıses dentro da UEM. Discutimos poss´ıveis raz˜oes para a dinˆamica de convergˆencia observada nos mercados de obrigac¸ ˜oes soberanas e, implicac¸ ˜oes futuras para o objectivo de ter uma completa integrac¸ ˜ao europeia.

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 discuss “The Future of Sovereign Borrowing.” The financial, economic and sovereign debt crisis has fundamentally changed the rules of the game in sovereign debt markets, particularly in the euro area, but also beyond its borders. Sovereign bonds are no longer widely perceived as ‘risk-free’ assets. Even the sovereign bonds of safe-haven countries have come under close scrutiny or lost some of their prime ratings. Yet crisis countries have seen dramatic downgrades of their sovereign debt ratings so that they face soaring risk spreads and unsustainably high financing costs (or even a loss of access to bond market financing), pushing them towards shorter financing or forcing them to rely on financial support from other countries and the international community or massive intervention by central banks.

I investigate the effect of transparency on the borrowing costs of Emerging Markets Economies. Transparency is measured by whether or not the countries publish the IMF Article IV Staff report and the Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC). Using difference-in-difference estimation, I study the effect on the sovereign credit spreads for 18 Emerging Market Economies over the period 1999-2007. I show that the effect of publishing the Article IV reports is negligible while publishing the ROSC matters, leading to a reduction in the spreads of over 15% in the samples 1999-2006 and 1999-2007.

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.