Austerity measures are frequently enacted when the sustainability of public finances is in doubt. Such doubts are reflected in high sovereign yield spreads and put further strain on government finances. Is austerity successful in restoring market confidence, bringing about a reduction in yield...

We show that government spending does play a role in shaping the yield curve which has important consequences for the cost of private and government financing. We combine government spending shock identification strategies from the fiscal macro literature with recent advancements in no-arbitrage...

Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous...

Policy makers often implement austerity measures when the sustainability of public finances is in doubt and, hence, sovereign yield spreads are high. Is austerity successful in bringing about a reduction in yield spreads? We employ a new panel data set which contains sovereign yield spreads for...

This paper revisits the discussion about the role that fundamentals play in asset prices using sovereign credit spread data. We augment the standard macroeconomic proxy set by text-based measures of country and global fundamentals from a database of Reuters news articles between 2007 and 2016....