We use a panel of euro area countries to assess the determinants of long-term sovereign bond yield spreads over the period 1999.01-2010.12. We find that, unlike the period preceding the global financial crisis, European government bond yield spreads are well explained by macro- and fiscal...

We use a panel of euro area countries to assess the determinants of long-term sovereign bond yield spreads over the period 1999.01-2010.12. We find that, on top of the fundamentals themselves, changes in the sensitivity of bond prices to fundamentals are also necessary to explain yields over the...

We use a new approach to assess long-term fiscal developments. By analyzing the time-varying behaviour of the two components of government spending and revenue - responsiveness and persistence - a feature not captured by automatic stabilisers, we are able to infer about the sources of fiscal...

Using bootstrap panel analysis, allowing for cross-country correlation, without the need of pre-testing for unit roots, we study the causality between government spending and revenue for the EU in the period 1960-2006. We find spend-and-tax causality for Italy, France, Spain, Greece, and...

Using bootstrap panel analysis, allowing for cross-country correlation, without the need of pre-testing for unit roots, we study the causality between government revenue and spending for the EU in the period 1960-2006. Spend-and-tax causality is found for Italy, France, Spain, Greece, and...

We assess the sustainability of public finances in the EU15 over the period 1970-2006 using stationarity and cointegration analysis. Specifically, we use panel unit root tests of the first and second generation allowing in some cases for structural breaks. We also apply modern panel...