The introduction of the euro meant that countries with sovereign debt problems could not use monetisation and devaluation as a way to prevent default. The institutional structures of the euro were also widely thought to prevent a country in difficulties being bailed out by other euro members or...

We study determinants of sovereign portfolios of Spanish banks over a long time-span, starting in 2008. Our findings challenge the view that banks engaged in moral hazard strategies to exploit the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures. In particular, we show that being a weakly capitalized...

We use quanto credit default swaps to analyze the impact of a credit event in the Euro zone on the Euro-Dollar exchange rate. In light of the European debt crisis, market participants are willing to pay more for protection against a sovereign credit event if the payment in such an event is...

This paper investigates the role of fiscal policies over the aggregate EMU business cycle. Previous studies, based on the assumption of non-separability between public and private consumption, obtain a large public consumption multiplier, a small fraction of non-Ricardian households and,...