The recent financial crisis offered an interesting opportunity to analyze the markets’ behavior in a high-volatility framework. In this paper, we analyzed the price discovery process of the Italian banks’ Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads through the Merton model, extended with the inclusion of a redenomination risk proxy, as to say, the risk that Italy could leave the eurozone. This paper contributes to the literature by integrating the classic Merton model with a political-sensitive market variable able to explain the greatest variance in the Italian banks’ CDS spreads during the most relevant and commonly recognized periods of socio-political and financial distress. Results show that the redenomination risk is progressively becoming the main driver of the process during crises, in particular for the sovereign debt crisis and in 2018.

Hedging and speculative strategies play a key role in periods of financial market volatility particularly during economic crises. In such contexts, liquidity problems tend to evolve into potential credit risk events that amplifies the volatility of several markets such as the CDS and the government bond markets. The former, however, generally embodies a higher sensitivity to volatility due to the operators’ uncertainty about unstable and countercyclical counterparty risk. The aim of this paper is to analyze the long-lasting dynamic relationship between credit default swap (CDS) premia and government bond yield spreads (GBS), by focusing particularly on sovereign credit risk, in order to evaluate the lead-lag markets in the price discovery process against the backdrop of a deep financial crisis. The focus of this study concerns the country of Italy, one of the major European countries that suffers from both weak GDP growth and high public debt, which subjects it to volatility and speculation during periods of financial stress. JEL classification numbers: G01, G12, G14, G20. Keywords: CDS spreads, Government bond spreads, Credit risk, Cointegration, Vector error correction model, Granger-causality.

One of the conventional and commonly accepted assumption in the financial world is the Efficient Market Hypothesis (Fama, 1970). However, the intellectual dominance of the efficient-market revolution has more been challenged by economists who stress psychological and behavioral elements of stock-price determination and by econometricians who argue that stock returns are, to a considerable extent, predictable (Malkiel, 2003). “Boom-bust” patterns are the empirical evidence of the efficient market nonsense. We suggest a theoretical linkage between the EMH and the Reflexivity Theory focusing mainly on the psychological profile. We suppose that, during stages of market exuberance/panic, the market pricing produces “gaslighting effects” and that mean-reverting behavior (i.e., contrarianism) is the result of participants’ awareness of psychological deviation from reality. We suspect that investors “benchmarking” plays a primary role on this latter aspect. Outside bubbles episodes, the market pricing is generally efficient and reflects the fundamental value evolution, without producing gaslighting effects. JEL classification numbers: G10, G11, G14. Keywords: Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), Reflexivity Theory, Gaslighting Effects.

Problems of optimization are pervasive in the modern world. Policy Makers, indeed, have the aim of adopting the best policies mix, under their budget constraint, to maximize economic and social welfare. We exploit the classical Consumer Theory to introduce the Policy Maker optimization problem in steering or empowering good decisions. Specifically, we focus on two main behavioral policies: nudging and boosting. This framework allows us, indeed, to focus on the main building blocks of the so-defined evolutionary function. Since the policy mix depends on the cost of the different policies and their different elasticities, under the (debatable) assumption of rational citizens (i.e. constant returns to scale), this means that these latter are the most important variables that should be estimated. Specifically, by means of surveys, we suggest approximating the elasticities level.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the long-lasting dynamic relationship between the credit default swap (CDS) premia and the government bond spreads (GBS), with regard to the sovereign credit risk. The practical focus is to evaluate whether the CDS market effectively is the leading or the lagging market in the credit risk price discovery process during the last decade of monetary easing. The analysis extends to all “sensitive” countries in the Eurozone, the so-called “PIIGS” countries (excluded Greece) for the interval 2007-2017. JEL classification numbers: G01, G12, G14, G20. Keywords: CDS spread, Government bond spread, Sovereign credit risk, Cointegration, Vector error correction model, Granger-causality.