Government Risk Premiums in the Bond Market: EMU and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on risk premiums paid by central governments in Europe and sub-national governments in Germany, Spain, and Canada. With regard to the European governments, we are interested in how these premiums were affected by the introduction of the euro. Using data for bond yield spreads relative to an appropriate benchmark, for the period 1991-2005, we find that risk premiums incurred by central governments of EU member states respond positively to central government debts and deficits. This is consistent with the notion of market-imposed fiscal discipline. We find that German states and, among them, especially those usually receiving transfers under the German fiscal equalization system, enjoyed a very favourable position in the financial markets before EMU as their risk premiums did not respond to fiscal balances. This special status seems to have disappeared with start of EMU. Monetary union, therefore, imposes more fiscal discipline on German states. In contrast, Spanish provinces paid risk premiums related to their fiscal balances both before and after the start of EMU. Both German and Spanish sub-central governments paid fixed interest rate premiums over their national governments which became smaller after the introduction of the euro and are more likely to be interpreted as liquidity premiums. We also estimate empirical models of risk premiums for Canadian provinces for which we find financial market penalties of adverse fiscal balances and debt indicators. However, as in the case of Germany before EMU, those provinces that typically receive transfers under the Canadian fiscal equalization scheme have a more favourable bond market treatment than others. The evidence of market discipline at work in European government bond markets supports the notion that the no-bailout clause in the EU Treaty is credible. JEL Classification: E43, E62, H63, H74
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".