IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eps/cepswp/6548.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Mispricing of Sovereign Risk and Multiple Equilibria in the Eurozone

Author

Listed:
  • De Grauwe, Paul
  • Ji, Yuemei

Abstract

This paper finds evidence that a significant part of the surge in the spreads of the PIGS countries (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) in the eurozone during 2010-11 was disconnected from underlying increases in the debt-to-GDP ratios, and was the result of negative market sentiments that became very strong since the end of 2010. We also find evidence that after years of neglecting high government debt, investors became increasingly worried about this in the eurozone, and reacted by raising the spreads. No such worries developed in stand-alone countries despite the fact that debt-to-GDP ratios were equally high and increasing in these countries. We interpreted this evidence as validating the hypothesis formulated in De Grauwe (2011) according to which government bond markets in a monetary union are more fragile and more susceptible to self-fulfilling liquidity crises than in stand-alone countries. We argue that the systematic mispricing of sovereign risk in the eurozone intensifies macroeconomic instability, leading to bubbles in good years and excessive austerity in bad years.

Suggested Citation

  • De Grauwe, Paul & Ji, Yuemei, 2012. "Mispricing of Sovereign Risk and Multiple Equilibria in the Eurozone," CEPS Papers 6548, Centre for European Policy Studies.
  • Handle: RePEc:eps:cepswp:6548
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ceps.eu/system/files/book/2012/01/WD%20No.%20361%20De%20Grauwe%20%2526%20Ji%20Multiple%20Equilibria%20in%20EZ.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eps:cepswp:6548. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Margarita Minkova (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cepssbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.