Benchmark Bonds Interactions under Regime Shifts

In the present paper we examine the interactions among five benchmark ten year government bonds, namely those of the USA, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Our aim is to illustrate empirically a net of interactions existing among the major bond markets of Europe and the US market taking into account shifts in the underlying stochastic processes. For this purpose, differing from the rest of the relevant empirical literature, after specifying the long run equilibrium relations we estimate the linkages between the bond markets as subject to hidden Markov chains, by applying the Markov Switching Vector Error Correction framework (MS†VECM). This formulation is found to efficiently reflect the shifts brought about by significant economic events, such as the European monetary unification. As a result we illustrate different short†run relations referring to the periods before and after the monetary union. Overall, our empirical results indicate that stronger interactions among the markets of the system exist in the period after the EMU. Also, by means of a variance decomposition analysis we assess leader†follower relations which indicate that the benchmark status of bonds has changed since the introduction of the common monetary policy framework in Europe.