We test whether the sharp increase in sovereign spreads of euro-area countries with respect to Germany after the explosion of the Greek crisis was due to deteriorating macroeconomic and fiscal fundamentals or to some form of financial contagion. Our analysis includes indicators of domestic and external imbalances which were mostly disregarded by previous studies, and distinguishes between investors' increased attention to the variables which ultimately determine the creditworthiness of a sovereign borrower (wake-up-call contagion) and behaviour not linked to fundamentals (pure contagion). We find evidence of wake-upcall contagion but not of pure contagion. Ã The views expressed in the paper do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of Italy. We are indebted to
We investigate the public-private wage differentials in ten euro area countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain) in the pre-crisis period (2004)(2005)(2006)(2007). To account for differences in employment characteristics between the two sectors, we focus on micro data taken from EU-SILC. The results point to a conditional pay differential in favour of our public sector proxy that is generally higher for women, at the low tail of the wage distribution, in the Education and the Public administration sectors rather than in the Health sector. Notable differences emerge across countries, with Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain exhibiting higher public sector premia than other countries.
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