Commercial banks in some euro area member states hold large amounts of sovereign debt that offer a risk premium and hence higher yields than AAA-rated bonds issued by the most creditworthy countries. In particular, banks in vulnerable countries exhibit a bias towards domestically issued...

Market liquidity is of value to both investors and issuers of securities, and is therefore a crucial factor in asset pricing. For the important asset class of Eurobonds, significant feedback from liquidity to pricing is established, and it is shown that bid-ask spreads (a proxy for market...

The growing asymmetry in the size of fiscal imbalances poses a serious challenge to the macroeconomic stability of the Euro Area (EA). We show that following a contractionary shock, the current monetary and fiscal framework weakens economic growth even in lowdebt countries because of the zero...

Market liquidity is of value to both investors and issuers of securities, and is therefore a crucial factor in asset pricing. For the important asset class of Eurobonds, significant feedback from liquidity to pricing is established, and it is shown that bid-ask spreads (a proxy for market...

The growing asymmetry in the size of fiscal imbalances poses a serious challenge to the macroeconomic stability of the Euro Area (EA). We show that following a contractionary shock, the current monetary and fiscal framework weakens economic growth even in low-debt countries because of the zero...

This paper explores how to restructure sovereign debt. It looks primarily at the Eurobonds of Zambia. This paper proposes four method for restructuring Eurobonds. For each method, it outlines the arguments that Zambia could make to justify the restructuring proposal. At the beginning of the...

This paper proposes a methodology to price bonds jointly issued by a group of countries—called Eurobonds in the euro-area context. We consider two types of bonds: the first is backed by several and joint (SJG) guarantees, the second features several but not joint (SNJG) guarantees. A crucial...

The euro crisis was fueled by the diabolic loop between sovereign risk and bank risk, coupled with cross-border flight-to-safety capital flows. European Safe Bonds (ESBies), a union-wide safe asset without joint liability, would help to resolve these problems. We make three contributions. First,...

When monetary and fiscal policy are conducted as in the euro area, output, inflation, and government bond default premia are indeterminate according to a standard general equilibrium model with sticky prices extended to include defaultable public debt. With sunspots, the model mimics the recent...

The purported advantages of corona bonds over the ESM are meagre to non-existent, says Friedrich Heinemann (EconPol Europe, ZEW). The challenge we face is to contain the spread of COVID-19 while stabilising the economy and ensuring eurozone states have sufficient liquidity and the ESM is a...

The paper discusses the most noteworthy measures taken or yet to be taken by the EU to combat the coronavirus crisis. Basically, the measures fall into four categories: (i) flexible application of EU rules that could hinder member states in their strenuous efforts to save their national...

The purported advantages of corona bonds over the ESM are meagre to non-existent, says Friedrich Heinemann (EconPol Europe, ZEW). The challenge we face is to contain the spread of COVID-19 while stabilising the economy and ensuring eurozone states have sufficient liquidity and the ESM is a...

With public debt-to-GDP levels now set to surpass post-war records and Italy’s ratio approaching levels reached in Greece on the eve of the country’s debt restructuring in early 2012, fears of a return of the sovereign debt crisis have emerged.

The long-term fiscal and economic damage of eurobonds in a rule-based fiscal architecture - as history corroborates - would be greater than the historical challenge of the coronavirus pandemic, unless there is a political union in Europe.

Well-designed eurobonds would lower financing costs for many euro area countries while hardly or not increasing the costs for the others. These bonds should have an explicit guarantee from the ECB. These bonds could be used up to a limit of GDP (a low number of 10-25% of GDP would allow to...

The paper shows that the introduction a Eurobond together with fiscal capacity at the centre would produce macro-stabilisation benefits both for the ‘core' and ‘periphery' of the Eurozone and would also achieve a rebalancing of the policy mix away from monetary towards fiscal stimulus. To...

This paper assesses the consequences of implementing a joint liability debt system in a two-country small open economy model. With joint liability a default of one country makes the other participant liable for its debt. The results highlight a trade-off between the contagion risk, in the sense...

The appearance of negative bond yields presents significant challenges for the fixed income markets, which mainly concern related forecasting models. The Nelson-Siegel-Svensson model (NSS) is one of the models that is most frequently used by central banks to estimate the term structure of...