The objective is to study the relative importance of domestic components of EMU sovereign yield spreads since the start of Monetary Integration. The results indicate a change in the market value of liquidity, as measured by market size, after EMU. JEL Classification Numbers: E44, F36, G15.Keywords: Monetary integration, sovereign securities' markets, international and domestic credit risk, and market liquidity.

4Non-technical summary 5

Although a growing literature examining the relationship between income and health expenditures suggests that healthcare is a luxury good, this conclusion is debatable owing to heterogeneity of the existing results. The paper tests the luxury good hypothesis (namely that income elasticity exceeds 1) by using meta-regression analysis, taking into consideration publication selection and aggregation bias. The findings suggest that publication bias exists, which is a result that is robust to the meta-regression model employed. Publication selection and aggregation bias also appear to play a role in the generation of estimates. The corrected estimates of income elasticity range from 0.4 to 0.8, which cast serious doubt on the validity of the luxury good hypothesis.

This paper empirically investigates the short and the long run impact of public debt on economic growth. We use annual data from both the central and the peripheral countries of the euro area (EA) for the 1961–2013 period and estimate a production function augmented with a debt stock term by applying the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach. Our results suggest different patterns across the EA countries and tend to support the view that public debt always has a negative impact on the long-run performance of EA member states, whilst its short-run effect may be positive depending on the country.

With European Monetary Union (EMU), there was an increase in the adjusted spreads of euro-area sovereign securities over Germany (corrected from the foreign exchange risk), causing a lower than expected fall in borrowing costs. The objective of this paper is to study the reasons for this increase, and in particular, whether the change in the price assigned by markets was due to domestic factors (credit risk and/or market liquidity) or to international risk factors. The empirical evidence suggests that it may have been a change in the market assessment of domestic (both liquidity and default risk) rather than international factors that caused the observed increase in adjusted spreads with Monetary Integration, even though, since market size scale economies have increased since EMU, their effect differs according to the size of the market. JEL Classification Numbers: E44, F36, G15.

a b s t r a c tWe measure the connectedness in EMU sovereign market volatility between April 1999 and January 2014, monitoring stress transmission and identifing episodes of intensive spillovers from one country to the others. We first perform a static and dynamic analysis to measure the total volatility connectedness in the entire period using a framework recently proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2014). Second, we use a dynamic analysis to evaluate the net directional connectedness for each country and apply panel model techniques to investigate its determinants. Finally, we examine the time-varying behaviour of net pair-wise directional connectedness at different stages of the recent sovereign debt crisis.

AbstractsWe analyse volatility spillovers in EMU sovereign bond markets. First, we examine the unconditional patterns during the full sample (April 1999-January 2014) using a measure recently proposed by Diebold and Yılmaz (2012). Second, we make use of a dynamic analysis to evaluate net directional volatility spillovers for each of the eleven countries under study, and to determine whether core and peripheral markets present differences. Finally, we apply a panel analysis to empirically investigate the determinants of net directional spillovers of this kind.

Our research aims to analyze the possible existence of Granger-causal relationships in the behavior of public debt issued by peripheral member countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), with special emphasis on the recent episodes of crisis triggered in the eurozone sovereign debt markets since 2009. With this goal in mind, we make use of a database of daily frequency of yields on 10-year government bonds issued by five EMU countries (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain), covering the entire history of the EMU from its inception on 1 January 1999 until 31 December 2010. In the first step, we explore the pair-wise Granger-causal relationship between yields, both for the whole sample and for changing subsamples of the data, in order to capture the possible time-varying causal relationship. This approach allows us to detect episodes of significant increase in Granger-causality between yields on bonds issued by different countries. In the second step, we study the determinants of these episodes, analyzing the role played by different factors, paying special attention to instruments that capture the total national debt (domestic and foreign) in each country.