Governments with high public debt risk that investors raise doubts about their ability to repay their debt since interest payments constitute an increasing share of public budgets. High interest payments may then fuel bond yields on secondary markets and subsequently lead to rising refinancing costs. This could precipitate a self-fulfilling prophecy according to which investors’ doubts about a default make the default more probable. Although there already are extensive research results on determinants of bond yields, the role of governments’ interest payments has not been duly taken into account. This paper tests whether the size of public interest payments had an influence on government bond yields during the European debt crisis. There seems to be indeed evidence that higher interest quotas and increasing interest-growth differentials entail higher bond yields.

Abstract:With the announcement to intervene on financial markets to restore the monetary transmission mechanism, the ECB has attenuated the pressure of the markets on the endangered peripheral countries of the Eurozone. Critics argue that by eliminating the markets' disciplining interest mechanism, governments in the crisis countries will not carry out reforms and consolidate their budgets. This kind of interplay between public deficit policy and financial markets is commonly discussed under the notion of Market Discipline Hypothesis. The hypothesis' second half suggests that governments react to rising interest rates by adjusting their deficit policy. Based on panel data for the European Union, different models are tested to investigate if governments react to rising interest rates. The results indicate that governments do raise their primary surpluses when they perceive the rising interest rates in their budgets. Governments react quite quickly to changing interest rates, although there seems to be some backlash in the medium-run.

No abstract

It has become common to criticize Germany and France for having broken the Stability and Growth Pact in 2003, supposedly giving way for higher deficits thereafter. However, this question has not yet been answered by the economic literature. It is closely related to the issue whether the Stability and Growth Pact had any disciplining effect on European Monetary Union member countries or not. This article examines the question whether joining the European Monetary Union or the breach of the Stability and Growth Pact in 2003 had an impact on deficits of member states. The empirical analysis shows no evidence for higher deficits after having joined the Eurozone or after having breached the Pact in 2003. These results are robust to different testing methods and when using different data samples. They can be explained with the fact that the Pact was undermined from its beginning and only had a limited disciplining effect henceforth. Otherwise the breakout of the ongoing debt crisis would hardly have been possible.