The pricing of G7 sovereign bond spreads – The times, they are a-changin

Against the background of the current debate about fiscal sustainability in several advanced economies, this paper estimates determinants of G7 sovereign bond spreads, using high-frequency proxies for market expectations about macroeconomic fundamentals and allowing for time-varying parameters. The paper finds substantial asymmetry in the importance of country fundamentals and considerable time variations in the pricing of risks. There has been a reduced pricing of several risk factors in the years preceding the financial crisis, and either an over-pricing of risk or the pricing of a re-denomination risk of euro area bonds during the European sovereign debt crisis, a pattern that does not apply to the non-euro area G7 bonds.