Is the EMU Government Bond Market a Playground for Asymmetries?

We investigate the volatility dynamics of some major European Monetary Union sovereign bond markets. We provide an endogenous characterization in terms of two Markov switching regimes for market volatility and analyze the impact of some institutional sector imbalances and policy actions on the persistence of volatility swings. The empirical findings indicate that net foreign assets' positions and trade balance developments were a matter of minor importance for these European Monetary Union sovereign bond markets. On the contrary, central banks' liquidity provision measures have important but asymmetrical effects on the persistence of the European Monetary Union's bond market volatility swings. Whether countries' specific government liquidity management affected volatility dynamics in a systematic and consistent way remains to a large extent inconclusive