ecb policy eurozone fragility saka fuertes kalotychou

7/23/2019 ECB Policy Eurozone Fragility Saka Fuertes Kalotychou

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ECB Policy and Eurozone Fragility:

Was De Grauwe Right?

ORKUN SAKA*, ANA-MARIA FUERTES and ELENA KALOTYCHOU

Cass Business School, City University London, U.K

First draft: November 2013; This draft: May 2014

Abstract

De Grauwes Eurozone fragility hypothesis states that member countries of a monetaryunion are highly vulnerable to a selffulfilling mechanism by which the efforts ofinvestors to avoid losses from default can end up triggering the very default they fear.We test this hypothesis by applying an eclectic methodology to a time window aroundDraghis whateverittakes pledge on July 26, 2012 which was soon after followed bythe actual announcement of the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program. Theprincipal components of Eurozone credit default spreads (CDS) validate this choice ofbreak date. An event study reveals significant preannouncement contagion from Spainto Italy, Belgium, France and Austria. Furthermore, the analysis of timeseriesregression residuals confirms frequent clusters of large bad shocks to the CDS spreadsof the above four Eurozone countries but soley during the preannouncement period.Our findings support the Eurozone fragility hypothesis and endorse the OMT program.

Keywords: Sovereign debt; Eurozone; European Central Bank; Outright Monetary

Transactions; Self-fulfilling panic.

JEL classification:E44, F36, G15, C52.

_____________________________________________________________________

*Corresponding author. Cass Business School, 24 Chiswell Street London, EC1Y 4UE United Kingdom; Tel: +44(0)75 9306 9236; [email protected].

We are grateful to Paul De Grauwe, Jos-Luis Peydr and Christian Wagner for their useful comments andsuggestions. We also thank participants at the Young Finance Scholars Conference and Quantitative FinanceWorkshop at the University of Sussex (May 2014), and seminar participants at Cass Business School, KeeleUniversity and Brunel University.


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"... You have large parts of the euro area in what we call a bad equilibrium, namely an

equilibrium where you may have self-fulfilling expectations that feed upon themselves and

generate very adverse scenarios." (Mario Draghi)1

1. Introduction

Financial crises represent one of the toughest riddles for economic policymakers and

financial economists. Following a crisis, the word contagion easily crops to the headlines and

the blame is put on investors risk appetites. However, a financial crisis may also be sparked

by the inherent features of an economic system. Investors actions may amplify the effects of

an exogenous shock to the economy, generating a yet larger shock (Danielsson et al., 2012).

As famously told by Shin (2010), the economic tragedy might sometimes be the natural result

of investors actions that, in trying to avoid individual losses, trigger an apocalypse for the

whole market. This so-called endogeneity brings about an additional fragility into todays

highly-connected economies and may even threaten the functionality and the benefits of the

modern free-market mechanisms. But certain economic structures lend themselves more than

others to the situation where the market shoots itself on the foot. Thus, it becomes crucial

for policymakers to ask questions such as: Which economic structures are more prone to this

type of market dysfunctionality? And what type of policy actions should be taken to break the

vicious circle between investor actions and market outcomes during financial crises?

Since 2009 when the Greek debt problems came to light, the suddenness and magnitude

of changes in Eurozone bond yield spreads have sparked wide debate among economists

regarding the likely causes. This debate resurrects two conflicting views of debt crises. The

fundamentalistview is that widening yield spreads reflect serious deterioration in countries

macroeconomic fundamentals. The multiple-equilibria view contends instead that markets

1MarioDraghi,6September2012.Seewww.ecb.europa.eu/press/pressconf/2012/html/is120906.en.html.


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may not always function optimally and therefore, countries may find themselves in multiple

separate (and distant) equilibrium conditions without experiencing any major change in fiscal

fundamentals. Thus, the decisions of panic-driven investors may lead a country to a crisis that

otherwise would not have unfolded; this is termed self-fulfilling dynamics.

The idea that a monetary union lends itself to the devilish effects of self-fulfilling

dynamics was originally promoted by Paul De Grauwe who summed it up in the Eurozone

fragility hypothesis (De Grauwe, 2011a,b). This hypothesis states that by issuing debt in a

currency that they cannot control, member states are more vulnerable to adverse investor

sentiment and sudden stops in capital inflows and hence, more prone to sovereign debt crises.

De Grauwes fragility hypothesis has as main element the notion of self-fulfilling dynamics,

namely, market pessimism2about a sovereigns ability to service its debt is likely to trigger

higher interest rates which will make it harder for the sovereign to rollover its short-term debt

and so forth until default is triggered.3Such phenomenon is less likely to occur in a sovereign

that maintains control over its currency, even though its fundamentals may be worse, because

the markets recognize the presence of a central bank that stands ready to inject the necessary

liquidity.4 De Grauwe and Ji (2013) note that countries with similar fiscal outlooks (e.g.,

Spain and UK) experienced notably different borrowing costs in the aftermath of the Greek

crisis. This is interpreted as evidence that multiple equilibria can exist in the Eurozone unless

2Thetermmarketpessimismisemployedinourpapertorefertoexpectationsthatinvestorsmightrationally

buildandlaterseevalidatedinaselffulfillingwayduetotheinteractionbetweenthemarketinterestrateand

thegovernmentbudgetconstraint(Calvo,1988;Corsetti&Dedola,2013).3Calvo (1988)was the first toemploy the logicofmultipleequilibria to rationalize sovereigndebtcrises in

countries that issue debt in a foreign currency by explicitly incorporating the role of expectations into a

governmentdebtauctionscheme.Multipleequilibriamodelswereproposedpreviouslyforexplainingbanking

crises(Diamond&Dybvig,1983)andcurrencycrises(Obstfeld,1984).4Corsetti&Dedola(2013)arguethatselffulfillingdebtcrisesareequallylikelyforaEurozonememberandfor

acountrythatissuesdebtinitsowncurrency.Theyalsoshowthatcentralbankshavetogetthefiscalsupport

of

the

Treasury

in

order

to

provide

a

credible

backstop

against

endogenous

market

expectations.

Since

such

supportishardertogetinamonetaryunionwithoutapoliticalunity,onecanthereforearguethatEurozone

countriesaremorepronetoselffulfillingdynamicsthanstandalonecountries.


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[3]

the European Central Bank (ECB) takes up the function of lender-of-last-resort (LOLR),

injecting the necessary liquidity in crisis.5Important steps have been taken in this direction.

The ECB President announced in July 27, 2012 that the ECB was prepared to do

whatever it takes to preserve the euro.6 In September 6, 2012, the Outright Monetary

Transactions (OMT) program was officially launched under which the ECB would act as a

LOLR for countries applying to the European rescue fund.7 This change in policy stance

provides an ideal laboratory to shed light on thefundamentalist versus multiplist debate of the

Eurozone debt crisis. This is the main goal of our paper. A thorny issue is that the two

schools of thought share various elements which make them difficult to separate empirically.

There is mounting evidence of wake-up callsin the Eurozone, namely, the phenomenon

by which markets ignore deteriorating fundamentals during non-crisis periods but become

highly sensitive to them in crises.8 Caceres et al. (2010) consider global risk aversion,

regional spillovers and country-specific fiscal fundamentals as drivers of surges in Eurozone

sovereigns between late 2009 and early 2010, and identify fundamentals as the main driving

force. Arghyrou and Kontonikas (2012) show that Eurozone markets were behaving

according to a convergence-trade model until the eruption of the global financial crisis in

the US, and fundamentals started to matter only after 2007. Beirne & Fratzscher (2013)

document wake-up call contagion as the main channel behind the recent turmoil in Eurozone

5ThustheECBwouldhavetointerveneonlywhenthereisarealriskofsolvency.Opponentsassertthatsucha

facilitymayfreeupgovernmentswillto imposedisciplineontheirfiscaloperations,butthiseffectcouldbe

mitigatedbythestrictfiscalsupervisionattachedtotheECBsliquiditymechanism.Multipleequilibriawould

ceasetoexistiftheECBcancrediblycommittoprovideliquiditytoacountrythatacceptsconditionalityand

cancrediblycommittostoptheprogramifthecountryceasestoabidebytheconditionality 6MarioDraghi,26July2012.Seewww.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2012/html/sp120726.en.html.7OMTisanECBprogramthroughwhichthebankcanmakepurchases(outrighttransactions)inthesecondary

bondsmarketsofEurozonememberstates.Conditionality isattachedtopreventmoralhazard.8 See Goldstein et al. (2000). This phenomenon is alignedwith notions of rational inattention bywhich

investors may rationally choose to ignore some information when the cost of information

acquisition/processing istoocostly.Somealsoargue that that theperceivedsafetyofgovernmentbonds in

Europe

before

the

crisis

was

due

to

the

implicit

bailout

guarantee

of

the

monetary

union

on

its

members

debt, butmarkets started to pay close attention to fiscal positions of countrymembers as soon as they

realizedthattherewasnosuchguarantee(Cochrane,2010)


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sovereign debt markets. Manasse and Zavalloni (2013) find that, only in crisis periods, the

Eurozone sovereign risk is strongly linked to the real economy and the labor market.

Multiple-equilibria models predict that fundamentals matter in the sense that very bad

and very good fundamentals would trigger a single equilibrium, default and not-default,

respectively; self-fulfilling dynamics would only unfold in an intermediate state of

fundamentals.9Hence, advocates of the multiplistview do not deny increased sensitivity to

fundamentals such as real GDP growth, public debt ratios, and current account to GDP ratios,

in the run-up to the Eurozone debt crisis (Aizenman et al., 2013; Grauwe and Ji, 2013). Their

key contention is instead that bond spreads of periphery Eurozone states have been too high

compared to otherwise-similar stand-alone countries even after allowing for increased

sensitivity to fundamentals, which leaves a role for self-fulfilling dynamics in the region. In a

nutshell, multiplistscontend that, although fundamentals matter, they are not the whole story.

As Krugman (2012) puts it So heres Europes Big Delusion: its the belief that Europes

crisis was essentially caused by fiscal irresponsibility. [] it is more complicated than that.

A fast-growing literature investigates the phenomenon of financial contagion (non-

uniquely defined with many nuances) among Eurozone sovereign debt markets.10A popular

definition of contagion, as originally proposed by Forbes and Rigobon (2002), is a significant

increase in cross-market linkages following bad shocks to one market. The increase in cross-

market linkages can take place through channels such as financial institutions, portfolio links

or wake-up calls and therefore, contagion is often the byproduct of increased globalization

(Forbes, 2012). This means that contagion threats in the Eurozone come necessarily hand-in-

hand with greater economic and financial integration among member states.

9 For a simple theoreticalmodel ofdebt criseswithmultipleequilibria, seeDeGrauwe (2011a). Formore

formaltreatments,seeCalvo(1988),Gros(2012),Corsetti&Dedola(2011;2013).10

See

Caceres

et

al.

(2010),

De

Grauwe

(2011a,

b),

Arghyrou

&

Kontonikas

(2012),

Caporin

et

al.

(2013),

De

Grauwe&Ji(2013,2014),Manasse&Zavalloni(2013),Alter&Beyer(2013),Mink&DeHaan(2013),Beirne&

Fratzcher(2013),Aizenmanetal.(2013),Beetsmaetal.(2013),DeSantis(2014), amongothers.


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Gomez-Puig and Sosvilla-Rivero (2013) adduce evidence in this regard by documenting

episodes of increased Granger-causality between peripheral Eurozone yields during the post-

2009 crises. They uncover two variables that consistently explain the probability of

occurrence of such episodes cross-border banking linkages and market liquidity and

conclude that preventing contagion among Eurozone markets would require radical structural

reforms such as transforming the euro area into a fully-fledged fiscal and banking union.

The focus of the present paper is to adduce empirical evidence on the validity of the

Eurozone fragility hypothesis which was originally articulated by the Belgian economist Paul

De Grauwe. This hypothesis encapsulates the idea that countries that are in a monetary union

and hence, lack control over their currency, are vulnerable to unnecessary (or non-

fundamental) contagion of bad news in sovereign debt markets through self-fulfilling panic.

Two essentially different concepts, sunspots and wake-up calls, can however materialize in

identical empirical observations: widened spreads following country-specific bad news. The

rationale behindsunspots(a key notion in the multiple-equilibria theory) is that such country-

specific bad news can trigger self-fulfilling fears that act as coordination mechanism by

concentrating investors sentiment on the bad equilibrium. In contrast, the logic behind wake-

up calls is that idiosyncratic (country-specific) bad news carries information and triggers a

learning process for investors. The main challenge remains to disentangle the notion of

contagion associated with self-fulfilling market pessimism (sunspots) from the fundamental

type of contagion that is associated with increased globalization (wake-up calls). The OMT

program provides a natural laboratory to separate these two notions.

The main contribution of this paper to the literature on the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis

is that it tests empirically the De Grauwe's Eurozone fragility hypothesis by utilizing the

OMT announcement as a 'laboratory'. Thus the paper represents the first attempt to shed light


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on the long-standing theoretical debate between fundamentalists and multiplists by

investigating whether the change of ECB policy stance (the OMT announcement) has

effectively curbed the unnecessary contagion driven by self-fulfilling dynamics in Eurozone

debt markets. Our sample is a cross-section of sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) contracts

for a representive sample of the so-called periphery versus core Eurozone countries and of

stand-alone European countries. This allows us to assess differences regarding the way that

markets have discriminated (in terms of sovereign risk pricing) between Eurozone

periphery and core countries, and between European stand-alone countries that control

their currency versus Eurozone countries that do not. We address our main research question

by deploying an eclectic methodology, namely, a principal component analysis, an event-

study analysis and a residual herding contagion analysis of CDS spreads.

The principal components analysis of Eurozone CDS spreads suggests that the OMT

announcement decreases the overall level and volatility of sovereign risk perceptions for the

Eurozone as a whole, and changes the way markets discriminate among sovereigns towards a

more fundamental-based approach. The event-study reveals that the pre-announcement

contagion effects from Spain-specific bad news largely recede post-announcement. The

residual analysis confirms that the OMT announcement mitigates the herding contagion

previously present in the region. Hence, it is more pertinent to interpret the contagion effects

as uninformative coordination mechanisms or sunspots than as wake-up calls.

Our findings support De Grauwes fragility hypothesis. Contagion effects from Spain to

Italy, Belgium, France and Austria in the period before the OMT announcement are not

visible after the OMT announcement. The residuals of time-series models of sovereign

spreads confirm frequent clustering of large negative shocks (hence, the presence of herding

contagion) for those countries where contagion effects were previously identified; but similar


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clusters are not observed in the post-announcement period. Overall these findings clearly

support the multiplist view of the crisis which does not overlook the importance of

fundamentals but further adds that, in times of massive economic adjustment, self-fulfilling

panic amplifies the initial exogenous shocks and can push an otherwise solvent country

towards default. The evidence thus suggests that there is more to the post-2009 Eurozone

sovereign debt crises than the previously-documented strengthening of the link between bond

yields and fundamentals. These results suggest that the OMT policy has been effective in

curbing unnecessary contagion in Eurozone credit risks, namely, the prospects of self-

fulfilling fear leading to huge interest rates on European bonds have receded. This evidence

also endorses indirectly the view that Europe is in a Big Delusion; namely, the belief that the

Eurozone crisis was solely caused by fiscal irresponsibility is wrong (Krugman, 2012).

Our paper informs a heated debate on the OMT program. Core members of the Eurozone

have expressed disapproval for the policy by arguing that such unlimited bond-buying

promises may pave the way for lazy governments postponing their structural reforms and

austerity plans (moral hazard). They further argue that the OMT program puts excessive risks

on core members who had done nothing wrong to bear the misdemeanours of the

periphery.11In sharp contrast, various economists have applauded the OMT announcement as

game-changer in the European sovereign debt markets (see, e.g., Krugman, 2011). The

empirical findings from the eclectic methodology deployed in this paper to investigate the

dynamics of European sovereign CDS spreads suggest that the OMT announcement has

curbed the unnecessary contagion among Eurozone countries instilled by self-fulfilling

panic. They serve to strengthen other supportive evidence from recent studies who find a;sp

that the OMT program has had a depressing effect on Eurozone bond yield spreads and

default risks (Falagiarda & Reitz, 2013; Lucas et al., 2013; Altavilla et al., 2014).

11SeeHansWernerSinn.OutrightMonetaryInfractions, ProjectSyndicate,February9,2014.


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The paper unfolds as follows. Section 2 describes the data and preliminary analysis.

Section 3 presents the empirical evidence on the De Grauwes Eurozone fragility hypothesis.

Section 4 discusses the policy implications, before concluding the paper in the final section.

2. Data Description and Preliminary Analysis

2.1 Sovereign Credit Default Swaps

We employ daily midpoint closing CDS spread quotes on 5-year sovereign credit default

swap (CDS) contracts from January 1, 2008 to July 25, 2013 collected from Datastream. The

CDS contracts correspond to 4 peripheral Eurozone countries (Ireland, Italy, Portugal and

Spain), 6 core Eurozone countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany and The

Netherlands), and 4 non-euro EMU countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK).12

CDS spreads are seen to capture default risk more accurately than bond yield spreads

because, as shown in Longstaff et al., (2005), the spreads on bond yields have a time-varying

non-default component that is strongly related to measures of bond-specific illiquidity.

The evolution of daily CDS spreads, plotted inFigure 1, confirms a first notable bout of

investors perceptions of upcoming risks for peripheral Eurozone sovereigns around March

2010 when Greece was first rescued. Declines in all CDS spreads are seen after July 26, 2012

when the ECB President made it clear that ECB was prepared to do whatever it takes to

preserve the euro; hereafter, this is called the implicit OMT announcement date in our paper

even though the official announcement of the OMT program occurs in early September.

[Insert Figure 1 around here]

12WefollowtheliteratureinexcludingfromourperipheryEMUcountriesrecententrants(suchasLatvia)and

other economically small countries (such as Luxembourg, Estonia, Slovakia,Malta and Slovenia); see, for

instance,Arghyrou&Kontonikas(2012),Beirne&Fratzcher(2013),DeSantis(2014),Beetsmaetal.(2013),De

Grauwe

&

Ji

(2013,

2014).

The

exclusion

of

Greece

is

driven

by

lack

of

CDS

data

from

March

2012.

However,

its

exclusionmaynotbematerial toouranalysisgiven that ithasbeen shown thatGreece loses its systemic

importanceinmorerecentstagesofthecrisis(seeHermosillo&Johnson,2014).


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Table 1 summarises the distribution of CDS premiums over the 12-month window

preceding the implicit OMT announcement (Panel A) and the 12-month post-announcement

window (Panel B). All premiums are in basis points so they are unit free. The actual cash

flows paid by the buyer of the CDS contract (as insurance on sovereign debt) are paid in US

dollars based on US dollar-denominated notional amounts. The last column reports the

change in CDS spreads from the initial day to the last day of the corresponding window.

[Table 1 around here]

The pre-announcement period exhibits a sharp rise in the level and volatility of CDS spreads;

Ireland and Portugal stand out as exceptions since they had by then received bailout

packages.13In the post-announcement period, the CDS spreads of all countries experience an

overall decrease from the first day (July 27, 2012) to the last day (July 25, 2013).

2.2 Commonality in credit risks of Eurozone sovereigns

We conduct a principal component (PC) analysis of daily CDS spreads over the pre- and

post-announcement periods to ascertain changes in the markets perception of commonality

and divergence in the credit risks of the 10 Eurozone sovereigns. Table 2reports the results.

[Insert Table 2 around here]

In the pre-announcement period, the first two components (denoted PC1 and PC2) explain 75

percent of the total variation in Eurozone CDS spreads, and the explanatory power that can be

attributed to PC1 is small (56 percent). However, during the post-announcement period the

two components capture 96 percent of the total variation, and PC1 explains 91 percent. The

explanatory power of PC1 substantially rises post-announcement. The marginal contribution

of PC2 is 19 percent (pre-announcement) and 4 percent (post-announcement). What does this

13IrelandwasrescuedonNovember22,2010andPortugalwassimilarlybailedoutonMay16,2011.


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mean? The first component can be interpreted as a Eurozone credit risk index constructed as

a weighted average of CDS spreads, and the second one as an index of the level of divergence

across countries (Longstaff et al., 2011; Arghyrou & Kontonikas, 2012).

The country loadings in the construction of the principal components, reported in the last

two columns of Table 2, are consistent with this interpretation. The loadings for PC1 are all

positive whereas those of PC2 tend to be positively signed for periphery countries and

negatively signed for core countries. Hence, the relatively high explanatory power of PC2

during the pre-announcement crisis period implies that at the height of the crisis, investors

perception of Eurozone credit risk was largely discriminatory across countries. Post-

announcement, the role of PC1 has notably risen suggesting that markets began perceiving

the Eurozone credit risk in a more unified manner after the ECB took the role of LOLR.

In the pre-announcement period, the contribution of Ireland and Portugal to PC1 (which

proxies a Eurozone credit risk index) is rather small as suggested by respective loadings of

0.097 and 0.020. This result is well aligned with the observation that Ireland and Portugal

were the only two Eurozone countries that experience an overall decline in CDS spreads over

the pre-announcement period (see Table 1). This evidence mirrors the fact that the two

countries received EU/IMF bailout packages at early stages which did alter investors risk

perceptions and decreased remarkably their systemic contribution. A similar conclusion is

reached by Alter & Beyer (2014) using a methodology that quantifies the systemic

contribution of each sovereign as the net spillover effect in a total net-spillover measure.

The loadings of PC2 reveal instead how investors separate out Eurozone members into

two distinct groups of countries. The sign of the loading indicates the group to which the

sovereign belongs. The size of the loading indicates how strongly the country belongs to that

particular group; before the announcement, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Finland (with a


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[11]

small loading) were in the same group with positive coefficients and the rest of the countries

were in the other set. Additionally, although the loadings of France and Austria are negative

they are very small at -0.037 and -0.025, respectively. This indicates that France and Austria

may also have been subject to contagion within the first group. Spain has clearly the largest

positive loading reflecting investors perceptions of upcoming risks that originate from this

sovereign. Therefore, during the pre-announcement period, the market clearly discriminated

against countries such as Spain and Italy but in favour of Portugal and Ireland, despite the

fact that all four of these countries are periphery economies. After the announcement, the

positive loadings of Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland indicate the investors classify them

back together into the same periphery group. Additionally, we observe that Belgium and

France (although with small loadings) are then classified as periphery which suggests that

they may have lost their core status in the eyes of investors. These findings allow us to begin

to argue that the implicit OMT announcement on July 26, 2012 has induced a more

fundamental-based pricing approach in the currency union. Thus the principal components

provide preliminary evidence that self-fulfilling panic has been largely present in the region.

Figure 2plots the first two principal components of the Eurozone CDS spreads obtained

from data over the entire 2-year period from July 26, 2011 to July 25, 2013. The relative

dynamics of the two factors, denoted PC1 and PC2, suggests a structural break at a point that

essentially coincides with the implicit OMT announcement date on July 26, 2012.


The two principal components exhibit visibly different dynamics pre- and post-

announcement. PC1 experiences wild swings around a high plateau before the announcement

but falls sharply and stabilizes around a much lower level shortly after the announcement.

This suggests that the OMT policy has helped decrease the market perception of overall


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[12]

Eurozone credit risk. PC2 experiences a steep upward trend in the first half of 2012 which

suggests that investors perception of Eurozone credit risk divergence (periphery versus

core classification) was rising; the OMT announcement marks the beginning of a reversal.

2.3 Spanish-specific news

In our empirical analysis of the dynamics of Eurozone credit risks, in order to ascertain the

presence of self-fulfilling panic, we define abnormal changes in the CDS spreads of a given

Euro country (dependent variable) as those driven by news to a troubled country after

controlling for credit risk in the European sovereign market as a whole. As proxy for a

European sovereign risk factor, denoted , we employ an average of CDS

spreads of the Eurozone countries in our sample (nine countries after setting aside the country

whose CDS spread changes will be used as the dependent variable)14and of those of the four

stand-alone EMU countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK).

We adopt July 26, 2012 as implicit OMT announcement date which breaks the two-year

sample period into two 12-month periods. To be precise, this choice corresponds to the day in

which the ECB President Mario Draghi (2012) made it clear that the ECB was ready to do

whatever it takes to preserve the euro. In fact, although the actual announcement of the

OMT program took place on September 6, 2012, many observers have argued that Draghis

whatever-it-takes speech represents the first bold initiative of the ECB towards its lender-

of-last-resort function in Eurozone sovereign debt markets.15Our analysis of CDS spreads via

a principal components decomposition revealed a break date on July 26, 2012 (see Figure 2)

which confirms that investors had already began then to anticipate the OMT program.

14

Given

that

the

country

that

is

used

as

dependent

variable

has

to

be

excluded

from

the

European

sovereign

riskindex,thevariablehastobereconstructedforeachofthe10EMUcountries.15

See,forinstance,Krugman(2011,2013)andPisaniFerry(2013).


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[13]

Nevertheless, a robustness check in the final section of the paper using September 6, 2012

(actual OMT announcement) as break date did not materially challenge the main findings.

Our next task is to choose a periphery Eurozone countryas the main contagion source

over the time period under study from July 26, 2011 to July 25, 2013. This country ought to

have experienced the peak of its debt problems during our sample period and had the highest

contagion-generation potential towards other Eurozone members. Greece, Portugal and

Ireland are not ideal candidates since, as mentioned earlier, the literature has reached a

consensus that countries receiving IMF/EU rescue packages at the early stages of the crisis

have lost their capacity to generate contagion later on (e.g., see Alter & Beyer, 2014). In fact,

some studies have shown that Spain and Italy have played a more pivotal role in the

transmission of financial shocks post-2009 (Gonzalez-Hermosillo & Johnson, 2014).

Moreover, our initial data analysis suggests that Spanish CDS spreads peak on July 24,

2012 (that is, two days prior to the date of implicit OMT announcement; see Figure 1).

Meanwhile, as suggested by the magnitude of its loading to PC2 in the analysis reported in

the previous section, Spain is the sovereign that was most discriminated against by the

markets in the pre-announcement period (see Table 2). All in all, we believe that Spain is a

reasonably good candidate as contagion source for testing the Eurozone fragility hypothesis.

Accordingly, we construct a Spain-specific news variable () that will be a key

input in the next stage of our analysis to assess whether news pertaining to Spain (unrelated to

other sovereigns fundamentals) act as a sunspot that shifts the equilibrium in European debt

markets. To identify the dates of most salient Spain-specific news, we fit by OLS a regression

of daily changes in Spanish CDS spreads on the changes in a European sovereign risk index

, , , , (1)


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[14]

over the pre- and post-announcement windows. Equation (1) can be seen as an asset pricing

model in the spirit of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) of Sharpe (1964). In each

period, the days corresponding to the 10 largest (absolute) residuals are cross-checked against

news related to Spanish economic fundamentals from UK Reuters.This residual approach is

aimed at reducing the possibility of event contamination on the days of Spain-specific news

by market-wide (i.e., Eurozone) shocks that would affect all sovereigns simultaneously.

Moreover, among the initially selected dates (according to the size of the residuals), we

exclude those for which we find no match of Spanish news or where they match news related

to bailout decisions by the European authorities or news related to ECBs actual purchases of

government debt.16When a date is excluded, we search for the next candidate, and so forth

until we find 10 dates in both periods with the most-salient Spain-specific news. We assume

that a large residual on any day reflects news arriving on that day; that is, the CDS premium

quickly incorporates all public information (semi-strong form market efficiency).

Table 3summarizes the Spanish-specific news thus identified. We are aware of the fact

that the news reported on an archive such as UK Reutersmay not always represent the actual

underlying causes of significant market movements. Yet they provide a good approximation

for what the average or representative investor would think about the important events on

each day and about their potential effects on debt markets (Mink & De Haan, 2013). As a

robustness check, we also search for news in the Bloomberg Businessweek archive, and

employ the symbols R (Reuters) and B (Bloomberg) in Table 3 to signify the news source.


16Forthepurposesofascertainingthepresenceofsunspotcontagion(orunnecessarycontagionduetoself

fulfillingpanic),

we

ought

to

filter

out

from

the

Spanish

specific

news

search

those

news

related

to

bailouts

of

troubledcountries.Suchdates(ifincluded)wouldleadtoanoverestimationofthesunspotcontagioneffects.


16/45

[15]

It is noteworthy that some of the news releases during the post-announcement period

were about the Spanish governments reluctance to apply for a rescue program; this can be

regarded as signals to markets (and EU officials) on the health of the Spanish economy and

not about the willingness of the EU/IMF to bailout countries. In any case, the inclusion of

such post-announcement news can only be regarded as a conservative approach, namely, it

may lead to overestimation of contagion in the post-announcement period during which,

precisely, we would expect less contagion if the Eurozone fragility hypothesis is valid.

Compared to the identification approach employed in Mink and De Haan (2013) to

identify Greece-specific news that is based directly on the observed CDS spread changes, we

believe that a residual-based approach is more suitable to isolate country-specific news. The

additional merit of the residual approach is that it identifies country-specific event dates as

days when the actual daily change in the sovereign CDS premium deviates substantially from

the expected values according to the CAPM pricing equation (1). Thus, it is possible to pin

down important news days even when no large CDS spread changes were observed.

Then, we define the Spanish-news contagion variable as a discrete variable equal to the

OLS residual from the CAPM equation (1) on the event dates, and zero otherwise.

, , (2)

where is a binary variable equal to 1 on the salient news dates identified, and 0 otherwise.

3. Empirical Results

We now test De Grauwes Eurozone fragility hypothesis, which is neatly aligned with the

multiplistdiscourse, using two methodologies that we outline in the next two subsections.


17/45

[16]

3.1 Event-study analysis

We employ a CAPM model to measure the abnormal responses of the Eurozone CDS

premiums to idiosyncratic shocks that are defined according to Spanish-specific news

, , , , , (3)

where the regressand is the daily CDS spread change in excess of risk-free rate for the ith

Eurozone country in our sample, beta is the European risk factor loading that represents

the sensitivity of the countrys CDS premium (in excess of the risk-free rate) to the European

CDS premium. The extent of the models mispricing is jointly captured by the term

which amounts in the present context to a time-varying abnormal return; is the main

parameter of interest that captures the spread changes induced by contagion from Spain. The

random innovations are assumed , ~ . ..0,. The risk-free rate (,) is proxied by the

1-day EONIA interest rate fromDatastream. This approach is similar in spirit to that used by

Mink & De Haan (2013) to analyze the impact of news about Greece (inferred from changes

in 10-year government bond prices) on bank stock prices during 2010.

The model is estimated for each of the Eurozone countries in our sample (in effect, 9

countries since Spain is adopted as the contagion source) separately over the 12-month pre-

announcement period and the 12-month post-announcement period. The Spanish-specific

variable is constructed from CDS spread data as explained in the previous section. The

results are presented in Table 4for each country, column labelled CAPM, and period.

[Table 4 around here]

Before the implicit OMT announcement date, the positive estimates of the news coefficient in

equation (3) suggest that contagion effects are present from Spain to other Eurozone countries

such as Italy, Belgium, Austria, France and the Netherlands; although the effect appears


18/45

[17]

statistically significant only for the first two countries. The largest contagion effects are

observed for Italy, a finding that is consistent with common perception and with formal

evidence of co-movements of Spanish and Italian debt spreads (Hermosillo & Johnson, 2014).

These results suggest that adverse Spain-specific news influenced market participants in their

perception of credit worthiness of other Eurozone countries, or that the CDS spreads of those

Eurozone countries increased abnormally prior to the announcement. To be specific, bad

news specific to the Spanish economy widened the CDS spreads of other Eurozone countries.

This observation is in line with our previous principal component analysis which suggested

(according to the loadings of PC2; see Table 2) that Spain, Italy, Netherlands (and possibly,

France and Austria) are priced differently from the remaining Eurozone countries in the 12-

month period prior to the implicit OMT announcement.

The finding of a negative news coefficient for Portugal and Ireland, which is statistically

significant, suggests that bad news specific to the Spanish economy (a widening Spanish CDS

premium) came hand-in-hand with substantial declines in these countries CDS premiums.

There can be various interpretations of this effect which maybe not rightly called contagion

per se.17One is that bad news coming from Spain before the OMT might have increased the

market expectations of an ECB intervention through the Securities Market Program (SMP).

Given the unclear and arbitrary nature of the SMP, each bad news for Spain might have

increased the perceived likelihood of ECB debt purchases in the secondary markets which, in

turn, positively influenced the CDS spreads of Portugal and Ireland. Another interpretation

would be that the focus of the crisis (news) was shifting away from bailed out countries

(Portugal and Ireland) to non-bailed ones such as Spain and Italy. Hence, market players were

learning positive information about the countries who applied strict austerity measures (in

17Contagiongenerallyreferstothetransmissionofonlynegativeshocks(seeForbes,2012).


19/45

[18]

exchange for the rescue packages) by comparing them to the new strugglers who were

resisting the austerity measures and declining the bailout programs offered to them.

The results reported in Table 4 based on CDS data are very much consistent with the

evidence of Eurozone contagion provided by Mink and De Haan (2013) from bond yield data.

Both studies document a significant abnormal deterioration (i.e., in excess of what a CAPM

type model would predict) in the creditworthiness of various Eurozone members in response

to country-specific bad news from another Eurozone country, Spain in our study (Greece in

theirs). However, we surmise that this contagion mostly reflects self-fulfilling panicwhereas

Mink and De Haan (2013) rationalize it as wake-up calls whereby markets are learning

information about sovereigns by observing the changes in the fundamentals of other countries.

In line with the multiple-equilibria discourse, we follow De Grauwe (2011a,b) in

conjecturing that the pre-announcement spillovers from Spain to various Eurozone countries

are largely a reflection of Eurozone fragility that is linked to the absence of a LOLR

mechanism; accordingly, we use the term sunspot contagion to describe this phenomenon.

Before the OMT program was introduced, the Eurozone lacked a liquidity mechanism to stop

debt runs (short-term liquidity problems) which were turned by investors, in trying to avert

their individual losses, into a solvency crisis. Eurozone CDS spreads were then very sensitive

to news releases about Spains fundamentals not because of the fundamental information they

conveyed but because, in the absence of a LOLR mechanism, adverse news act as sunspots

changing investors sentiment and coordinating the market into a bad equilibrium.

The second part of Table 4reports results of the CAPM equation (3) estimated over the

post-announcement period. Interestingly, no significantly positive news coefficient lambda ()

is obtained post-announcement for any of the Eurozone member countries examined. Thus

there are no significant Spanish-news spillovers to other Eurozone countries after the date of


20/45

[19]

implicit OMT announcement on July 26, 2012 which confirms the validity of the above

conjecture. This is the gist of the argument: if the response of Eurozone CDS spreads to

Spanish-specific news was, in fact, the result of fundamentals-based learning effects (i.e.,

news about Spain prompting investors to assess the vulnerability of other countries according

to fundamentals) as the wake-up callhypothesis states then, one would notexpect a LOLR

announcement to have any mitigating effect on such contagion. The sharp contrast observed

in the pre- and post-announcement periods regarding the influence of Spain-specific news on

Eurozone CDS spreads, as shown in Table 4, does not provide support for the wake-up calls

explanation for the transmission of the sovereign debt crisis from one Eurozone country to

another. Instead the evidence points towards the presence of self-fulfilling panicin the region.

In sum, it seems fair to interpret the evidence as suggesting that the OMT announcement

(namely, the willingness of the ECB to act as lender-of-last-resort) has been quite successful

in curbing the self-fulfilling panic that might have been at play for a long time since the early

2011 outbreak of Eurozone debt problems. Our results suggest that, when there is no liquidity

facility in the debt markets of a common currency (such as Euro), it is possible for self-

fulfilling panic to coordinate the markets from one equilibrium onto another.

3.2 Herding contagion analysis

The next task in our research agenda is to provide evidence on the validity De Grauwes

Eurozone fragility hypothesis through a residual-based herding contagionanalysis. The main

idea is to ascertain the simultaneous transmission/occurrence of large negative shocks among

various sets of Eurozone and non-Eurozone EMU countries. Measuring the clustering of

extreme adverse shocks is the closest approach to the notion of contagion used in media and

political circles and constitutes the cleanest approach to measuring the most common

definition of contagion any transmission of extreme negative shocks (Forbes, 2012, p. 9).


21/45

[20]

The thrust of the argument is that the clustering of large negative shocks ( i.e., the

simultaneous rise in sovereign bond yields or CDS premiums that cannot be explained by

common risk factors) relates to investors fear of losses as opposed to a (fundamental)

information-learning process. Such sudden rise in CDS spreads of a group of countries would

represent a debt run against the particular group at a particular time driven by panic. We

conjecture, in line with the multiplistdiscourse, that the clustering of large bad shocks was

countered by the OMT program. More precisely, by implicitly announcing its willingness to

act as a superior force of last resort (on July 26, 2012) the ECB was able to restrain the self-

fulfilling panic in Eurozone debt markets and, in turn, the unnecessary contagion.

In order to derive the residuals (as proxies for unexpected shocks) we begin by estimating

the CAPM equation over the two-year sample period around the implicit OMT announcement

, , , , (4)

for each country i=1,,N in our sample (N=14 sovereigns). Thus we obtain a daily time-

series of residuals per country , , 1, . , (the two-year sample enables T=523 residuals

per country). We construct the empirical distribution of residuals for each country, and focus

on the left-tail residuals (as proxies for extreme bad shocks) defined using the 20 th or 10th

percentile criteria. Finally, we identify days over the two-year sample period when a large

proportion of countries simultaneously experience extreme bad shocks; such cross-country

clustering of shocks (80% of countries or above) represents our herding contagionindex. This

technique is similar in spirit to that employed by Beirne and Fratzcher (2013).

Based on our previous findings (from the principal components decomposition of CDS

spreads in Section 2.1 and the Spain-specific news analysis in Section 3.1) we assign

countries to three groups. The first group comprises Spain, Italy, Belgium, France and Austria

as their CDS premiums have been particularly sensitive to adverse shocks in the absence of a


22/45

[21]

liquidity facility; this is called the contagion set. The second group comprises Finland,

Germany, Ireland, Netherlands and Portugal that, according to our previous results, are less

likely to be affected by adverse shocks during the two-year period under study; we call it the

non-contagion set. The third group consist of four core non-Eurozone EMU countries

(Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the UK); this is the control set. According to the multiplist

view, and as encapsulated in De Grauwes Eurozone fragility hypothesis, the market

perception of creditworthiness of these stand-alone countries is unlikely to be bedevilled by

self-fulfilling panic precisely because they retain sovereign control over their own currencies.

Figure 3plots the herding contagionindexes obtained for the three sets of countries.


Examining first the contagion set, it is clear that cross-country clusters of extreme bad

shocks occur more frequently pre- than post-announcement (to be specific, on 22 and 3 days,

respectively). With the 20th percentile criteria, only three clusters are identified post-OMT

announcement. Two of these clusters occur in days immediately before the explicit ECB

announcement of the OMT program in September 6, 2012; they would not be counted as post-

announcement herding contagion spots had we adopted the explicit OMT announcement as

our main event. The third cluster is dated November 20, 2012 and, interestingly, it is seen also

in the non-contagion set; hence, it must be associated with a Eurozone-wide systematic risk

factor that our pricing model does not capture. Analogous results are obtained using the most

conservative 10th percentile criteria to focus on residuals located further into the left-tail.

Overall these findings suggest that the clustering of extreme adverse shocks to the sovereign

CDS premiums of Eurozone countries in the contagion set is significantly more frequent

during the year prior than following the implicit OMT announcement.


23/45

[22]

Now we turn attention to the other two sets of EMU countries. We can observe that both

the non-contagion Eurozone set and the non-Eurozone set experience very few clusters of

extreme adverse shocks and, most importantly, the frequency of them is essentially similar

over the pre- and post-announcement years. There is no change of pattern after the implicit

OMT announcement date in the amount of herding contagionidentified for these countries.

Summing up, the analysis in this section suggests significant herding contagionpre-OMT

announcement precisely for the same Eurozone countries which were identified in our

previous analysis as being subject to sunspot contagionlinks. However, the herding contagion

is limited after the ECB pledged to do whatever it takes to keep the Euro together. Our

interpretation of these findings is that the herding contagion was mainly due to self-fulfilling

panic that pushed these countries into a worse equilibrium than fundamentals would warrant.

3.3 Additional results

To assess the robustness of the results reported in the previous sections, we consider a pricing

equation which is grounded in the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) of Ross (1976). This

approach builds on recent empirical studies that proxy unobserved sources of commonalities

across sovereigns via market indices (Bekaert et al., 2011; Manasse & Zavalloni, 2013).

Formally, the APT pricing equation that we employ can be written as follows

,

,

, (5)

, , ,

where the loadings or betas, , measure the sensitivity of the countrys daily spread

changes to the daily changes in three risk factors: a global sovereign risk factor, a European

sovereign risk factor and a financial intermediaries risk factor. The regression is estimated

over the pre- and post-OMT announcement periods to identify Spanish-specific news dates.


24/45


25/45

[24]

is 0.0459 and that of EONIA is 0.0008). We apply the factor

orthogonalization approach used by Bekaert et al. (2009) and Manasse & Zavalloni (2013).18

Most of the Spanish-specific news dates thus identified coincide with those reported

earlier in Table 3; the only one change is that 23.09.11 is replaced by 29.07.11 (pre-

announcement).19 We then create the Spanish-specific news variable, ,

,, where is 1 at the identified news dates and 0 elsewhere, and , is the

new residual sequence. Although the magnitude of the residuals at the identified dates is

different for the APT model and CAPM model (initially employed), the two news variables

are very close as borne out by a Pearson correlation of 0.9595 (p-value=0.00). The estimation

results for the counterpart of equation (4) using three systematic risk factors are reported

under the column labelled APT in Table 4. Before the announcement, the coefficient of the

news variable is positive and significant for Italy, Belgium, France and Austria. After the

announcement, none of the news coefficients is positive and they are all insignificant without

exception. Likewise, the herding contagionindexes derived from the APT model (5) made no

meaningful difference to the findings and we do not report them to preserve space.

Second, we conduct the event-studyanalysis of Section 3.1 by accounting for the time-

variation in the risk factor loadings (the beta coefficients). The idea of this robustness check is

to gauge the extent to which not allowing for such time-variation may bias the news

18We adopt the residualsof theOLS regression as theorthogonalized

Europeansovereignrisk factor.Thisresidualconstructionexercise isrepeated10times,oneforeachof the

indicesavailableforeachcountry(whoseCDSspreadchangewasexcludedfromtheEuropeansovereignindexconstruction).Nextweruntheregression

,andtaketheestimatedresidualsastheorthogonalizedEuropeanfinancialriskfactor;againthisneedsto

be repeated 10 times one for each to obtain an orthogonalized

per country.

However,themainfindings inthesubsequentempiricalanalysisofthepaperdonotmateriallychange ifwe

employdirectlythe(nonorthogonalized)factors;detailedresultsareavailablefromtheauthorsuponrequest.

19TheSpanishspecificnewson29.07.11(Reuters)isthatMoodysputsSpainonwatchlistonFridayadding

toconcerns

that

aGreek

rescue

package

has

done

little

to

had

the

spread

of

Europes

debt

crisis

(Reuters).


26/45

[25]

identification. For this purpose, the residuals are obtained by a rolling estimation approach;

namely, the residual for day tis obtained as the difference between the actual CDS change on

that day and the expected CDS change for that day obtained by using the coefficients of the

pricing model, equation (1), estimated over the corresponding window (covering a one-year

period of 261 days) ending on day t-1. The window is then rolled forward one day to obtain

the residual for day t+1 and so forth. This helps us better capture the surprise component

(unexpected shock) on day t. This rolling exercise made no meaningful difference to the

news identification; in fact, about 90% of the dates thus detected match the dates in Table 3.

We also repeat the herding contagionanalysis by re-estimating the CAPM equation (4)

and APT equation (5) over rolling windows. The results based on the CAPM model, reported

in Figure 5,and those based on the APT model (unreported to preserve space) are virtually

undistinguishable from those reported earlier in Figure 4.


In an additional robustness check, we employ a narrower one-year window for the

event-study which amounts to a 6-month pre-announcement period (January 26, 2012 to July

25, 2012) and a 6-month post-announcement period (July 27, 2012 to January 25, 2013). The

main purpose of this analysis, summarized in Table 5, is to measure in a more sterilised

manner the impact of the OMT announcement. A shorter window permits also better to isolate

the analysis from changes in the fundamental channels of contagion (e.g., trade or financial

links). We repeat the same CAPM-based procedure described in Section 3.1 to construct the

Spanish-specific news variable, ,, with the only difference that we focus now on

the 5 most salient events (instead of 10) in each period, due to the smaller sample. 20


20Thesignificantnewsassociatedwiththedatesidentifiedoverthissmallerperiodareavailableuponrequest.


27/45

[26]

The results in Table 5 are in line with our main finding that the significant contagion

effect of Spain-specific events towards the CDS premiums of other Eurozone countries during

the pre-OMT announcement phase loses its significance after the OMT announcement.

In a final robustness check, instead of adopting Mario Draghis whatever-it-takes

speech (July 26, 2012) as the implicit OMT announcement date, we take the official OMT

announcement (September 6, 2012) as the breakpoint for our analysis. The results (unreported

to preserve space) do not challenge in any significant way our main findings.21

4. Policy Implications

The Eurozone fragility hypothesis states that countries that have adopted the euro are prone to

sudden reversals in capital triggered by investors fears that can ultimately trigger the very

default they fear; this is what De Grauwe (2011a) calls devilish self-fulfilling dynamics. Can

this happen in the US, UK or Japan? Surely not, because these countries can count on their

central banks to inject liquidity into the markets in a cash squeeze. Unless the ECB takes the

role of lender-of-last resort in sovereign debt markets, Euro countries are downgraded to the

status of emerging countries that issue debt in a foreign currency. The OMT program

represents a big step towards completion of the European currency union and avoiding such

fragility. This policy stance can ensure a single equilibrium for all Eurozone countries.

Our finding that Eurozone debt markets have been subject to self-fulfilling panic serves

to undermine the you-deserve-what-you-get attitude of hardcore fundamentalists. The

evidence we provide that the implicit OMT announcement has curbed such devilish self-

fulfilling dynamics (as a contagion channel, albeit not the only one) in Eurozone debt markets

highlights the institutional role played by the ECB to prevent debt runs in the region.

Overall our results support De Grauwes Eurozone fragility hypothesis.

21Alltheunreportedresultspertainingtotherobustnesschecksareavailablefromtheauthorsuponrequest.


28/45

[27]

Recent developments have fuelled the public debate on Mario Draghis whatever-it-

takes bond buying program. In response to German eurosceptics protests against the

legality of the OMT program, the German Constitutional Court recently (as of February

2014) passed the case to the European Court of Justice; at the time of writing, the latter has

still not produced a response. We believe that it is important to make informed judgements,

as opposed to unfounded opinions, on the subject. Our paper contributes to this purpose by

showing that the implicit OMT announcement has been very effective in countering

unnecessary contagion in the Euro area. The evidence suggests that the new policy stance

has helped not only the periphery (such as Italy and Spain) but also core members (such as

Belgium and France) who are struggling to get their economics into pre-crisis form as their

southern neighbours face the risk of deflation and stagnation. On this basis, the new ECB

policy stance can be seen as beneficial for the interests of the Eurozone as a whole.

5. Conclusion

The turmoil in Eurozone debt markets that erupted more than five years ago has fuelled a

heated debate among two old schools of thought. While fundamentalists primarily blamed

Euro countries deteriorating fundamentals for the turmoil, multiplistsargued that a dynamics

of self-fulfilling panic has been at play in the Eurozone. According to the latter view, the

European Central Bank (ECB) ought to accept the lender-of-last-resort position in

government debt markets in order to counter such devilish dynamics (De Grauwe, 2011b).

Such major change in policy stance can prevent Eurozone sovereign debt markets from being

pushed into a worse equilibrium than their fundamentals warrant.

ECB President Mario Draghi remarked in July 27, 2012 that the Bank was prepared to

do whatever it takes to keep the euro together; shortly after, the ECB announced the

Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program. As the financial press sums it The remark


29/45

[28]

triggered a lasting rally in government-bond markets in southern Europe. The ECB did not

even have to purchase any government bonds. Mario Draghis words were enough.22

The main goal of this paper is to provide empirical evidence regarding the Eurozone

fragility hypothesis and, relatedly, on the contagion mitigating effects of the new ECB policy

stance. ECB President Mario Draghis remark on July 27, 2012 is adopted as the implicit

OMT announcement date in our investigation. An event-study analysis reveals significant

contagion from idiosyncratic bad news specific to Spain towards other Eurozone countries but

only prior to the announcement. Additionally, we find frequent cross-country clusters of large

bad shocks (the so-called herding contagion) among the same set of Eurozone countries

(including Spain) but the herding contagion becomes rather muted post-announcement.

Our results suggest that that the new ECB policy embodied in the OMT has curbed the

self-fulfilling dynamics and hence, the unnecessary contagion in Eurozone debt markets.

On this basis, the potential decision against the OMT by the European Court of Justice will

not be in the best interests of the region. The empirical evidence presented in this paper calls

for the OMT to be formalized into European law.

We hope that our paper inspires more research to inform this debate, for example, in

trying to ascertain if the ECBs new role as a superior force of last resort in the Eurozone

banking system has reduced the amount of systemic risk in European debt markets, for

example as defined and operationalised in Ang & Longstaff (2013).

22

In

ECB

Considers

Action

to

Stem

Low

Inflation

(Brian

Blackstone,

Wall

Street

Journal,European

edition,

26

th

March2014).


30/45

[29]

APPENDIX A. Descriptive Statistics for daily non European sovereign DS spreads from July 26, 2011 to JuCountry Average St. Dev. Min Brazil 137.64 24.54 99.23 Bulgaria 230.90 109.68 90.85

Chile 94.51 22.57 61.11 China 103.04 30.87 55.81 Colombia 123.16 28.07 75.16 Croatia 387.70 103.42 233.65 Hungary 425.21 122.66 241.21 Israel 156.40 29.39 105.24 Japan 93.56 23.29 55.38 Korea 108.53 36.65 56.26 Malaysia 108.14 28.11 66.02 Mexico 122.59 26.78 74.17 Pakistan 900.04 30.21 816.31 Panama 120.80 26.83 74.82 Peru 129.73 31.51 82.05 Philippines 138.98 39.05 80.32 Poland 165.25 74.72 73.73 Qatar 101.78 24.11 62.24 Romania 311.88 93.87 180.57 Russia 186.78 46.17 116.41 Slovakia 177.27 75.67 86.72 South Africa 150.52 21.27 107.95 Thailand 128.56 35.99 81.96 Turkey 201.05 59.58 109.82 Ukraine 720.73 124.41 448.78

Venezuela 847.56 155.17 571.42 Notes: All the CDS spreads are measured in basis points. CDS denotes the change in the spread from the initial da


31/45

[30]

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Panel A: Peripheral Eurozone countries

Panel B: Core Eurozone countries

Panel C: Stand-alone EMU countries

Figure 1. Evolution in daily sovereign CDS spreads from December 5, 2008 to July 25,

2013. The CDS spreads reported in basis points pertain to 10 eurozone countries separated out as core andperipheral using the standard classification, and 4 EMU countries that have not adopted the euro. The first dotted

vertical line on March 31, 2010 marks the date of the first rescue package for Greece, and the second line on July

26, 2012 marks the date when the ECB declared that it was prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve theeuro which is taken as implicit OMT announcement.

IrelandItalyPortugalSpain

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

250

500

750

1000

1250

1500

1750

IrelandItalyPortugalSpain

AustriaBelgiumFinlandFranceGermanyNetherlands

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

250

500

750

1000

1250

1500

1750 AustriaBelgiumFinlandFranceGermanyNetherlands

DenmarkNorwaySwedenUK

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

250

500

750

1000

1250

1500

1750 DenmarkNorwaySwedenUK


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Figure 2. First and second principal components of daily Eurozone CDS spreads. Thevertical dotted line denotes the implicit OMT announcement date on July 26, 2012. The first and secondprincipal components are extracted from the correlation matrix of daily CDS spreads over the 2-year period fromJuly 26, 2011 to July 25, 2013 for 10 Eurozone countries of which four are peripheral (Ireland, Italy, Portugaland Spain) and six are core (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany and Netherlands).

PC1 PC2

2012 2013

-4

-3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

4

5

PC1 PC2


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Panel A: 20thpercentile rule Panel B: 10

thperc

Contagion Euro countries Non-contagion Euro countries Stand-alone

Figure 3. Herding contagion indices for 3 sets of EMU countries. CAPM pricing equation. The verannouncement. The graph plots on each day of the pre- and post-announcement periods the percentage of countries in the correshocks according to the CAPM equation (4) using the 20thpercentile or 10thpercentile criteria. Only days when at least 80%shocks are plotted. The contagion set of Eurozone countries comprises Spain, Italy, France, Belgium and Austria. The non-conPortugal, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands and Finland. The stand-alone set (non-Eurozone EMU) of countries comprises Denma

2012 2013

0.5

1.0

2012

0.5

1.0

2012 2013

0.5

1.0

2012

0.5

1.0

2012 2013

0.5

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2012

0.5

1.0


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[36]

Panel A: Global and European CDS spreads (daily levels)

Panel B: Global and European CDS spreads (daily changes)

European sovereign risk Global sovereign risk European financial risk

Figure 4. Global sovereign risk, European sovereign risk and European financial risk. Thefirst vertical line (March 31, 2010) marks the outbreak of the Eurozone debt crises when Greece received its first

rescue package. The second line (July 26, 2011) denotes the implicit OMT announcement date. The globalsovereign risk index is an average of CDS spreads of 26 non-European countries. The European sovereign riskindex is an average of the CDS spreads of 10 Eurozone countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germancy,Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) plus 4 stand-alone EMU countries (Denmark, Norway, Swedenand UK). The European financial risk index is the Markit iTraxx Senior Financials index that is composed of the25 most liquid CDS names on senior debt issued by European financial institutions. The time span is December 5,

2008 to July 25, 2013. All the indices have been normalized to 100 in 2009.

2009 2010 2011 2012 20132009 2010 2011 2012 2013

50

75

100

125

150

175

200

225

250

275

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

-0.3

-0.2

-0.1

0.0

0.1

0.2


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Panel A: 20thpercentile rule Panel B: 10

thpe

Contagion Euro countries Non-contagion Euro countries Stand-alone

Figure 5. Herding contagion indices for 3 sets of EMU countries. CAPM pricing equation. RollingFigure 4 based on rolling estimation of the CAPM equation (4) to identify the shocks. We employ an estimation window of 26time. The vertical dotted line denotes the implicit OMT announcement. The graph plots on each day of the pre- and postcountries in the corresponding set that experience large negative shocks using the 20

thpercentile or 10

thpercentile criteria. On

experience large negative shocks are plotted. The contagion set of Eurozone countries comprises Spain, Italy, France, Belgiumset of Eurozone comprises Ireland, Germany, Netherlands and Finland. The stand-alone set (non-Eurozone EMU) comprises De

2012 2013

0.5

1.0

2012

0.5

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2012 2013

0.5

1.0

2012

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Table 1.Descriptive statistics for daily sovereign DS spreads of European countries.

Panel A.Preannouncement26.07.2011 25.07.2012 Postan

Average StDev Min Max CDS Average St

Periphery Eurozone countries

Ireland 696.76 110.06 522.25 973.43 370.31 222.95 9Italy 452.92 68.16 271.88 586.70 276.63 288.96 6Portugal 1133.30 145.71 781.71 1601.00 125.39 453.77 12Spain 435.54 78.32 314.91 634.35 294.89 306.69 8Core Eurozone countries

Austria 164.72 28.42 86.91 236.13 50.47 50.92 2Belgium 260.92 40.15 175.76 398.78 26.14 88.32 3Finland 70.63 8.95 44.34 87.24 15.54 31.85 France 184.25 24.23 112.23 245.27 66.34 88.18 2

Germany 88.00 11.97 59.97 118.38 20.43 39.45 1Netherlands 103.13 16.58 52.19 133.84 41.82 54.61 1NonEurozone core EMU countries

Denmark 117.54 15.23 65.31 157.46 32.04 38.27 1Norway 36.15 8.47 20.84 52.11 4.15 19.76 Sweden 58.71 10.29 32.69 84.23 19.77 23.61 United Kingdom 78.25 11.53 58.66 101.64 10.24 44.85

Notes: The table summarizes the distribution of daily sovereign CDS spreads of 14 European countries over two 12-month leng

OMT announcement on July 26, 2012. CDS is the change from the initial day to the last day of the corresponding p


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Table 2. Principal component decomposition of daily Eurozone DS spreads.

Eigenvalues Total variationexplained %

Country loadings eigenvectors PC1 PC2

Panel A. Preannouncement 26.07.2011 25.07.2012

PC1 5.646 56.46 Austria 0.385 0.025PC2 1.877 75.22 Belgium 0.320 0.398PC3 1.253 87.76 Finland 0.346 0.040PC4 0.470 92.46 France 0.405 0.037PC5 0.334 95.80 Germany 0.368 0.109PC6 0.229 98.09 Ireland 0.020 0.533PC7 0.072 98.81 Italy 0.368 0.095PC8 0.057 99.38 Netherlands 0.377 0.162PC9 0.034 99.72 Portugal 0.097 0.449

PC10 0.028 100.00 Spain 0.208 0.552Panel B. Postannouncement 26.07.2012 25.07.2013

PC1 9.148 91.48 Austria 0.328 0.025

PC2 0.450 95.98 Belgium 0.328 0.039PC3 0.223 98.21 Finland 0.322 0.135PC4 0.070 98.91 France 0.325 0.004PC5 0.044 99.35 Germany 0.310 0.344PC6 0.028 99.63 Ireland 0.327 0.056PC7 0.014 99.77 Italy 0.320 0.106PC8 0.011 99.89 Netherlands 0.282 0.628PC9 0.007 99.96 Portugal 0.294 0.613

PC10 0.004 100.00 Spain 0.323 0.276Notes: The table reports eigenvalues j, j=1,,10, and the proportion of the total variation in 10 Eurozone CDS

spreads explained by each principal component given by j/j. The last two columns report the eigenvectors orcountry loadings to construct the first and second principal components (denoted PC1 and PC2, respectively).


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Table 4. Spainspecific news effects on Eurozone sovereign DS spreads: 2year window analysis.

Preannouncement: 26.07.2011 25.07.2012 Austria Belgium Finland France CAPM APT CAPM APT CAPM APT CAPM A

European **1.1370.085

**0.7510.067

**1.1410.069

**0.9380.072

**0.8220.081

**0.6280.092

**1.1070.086

**0

Financial *0.1070.045 0.036

0.044 **0.110

0.039 **

0Global **1.4850.097

**1.2390.076

**0.9650.077

**0

0.0020.002

0.0010.002

0.0000.002

0.0010.002

0.0010.002

0.0000.002

0.0020.002

00

News 0.2190.184

**0.432

0.099

**0.404

0.097

**0.506

0.118

0.086

0.178

0.210

0.138

0.207

0.134

*0

0

Adj. R 0.57 0.68 0.68 0.72 0.45 0.49 0.59 0 Ireland Italy Netherlands CAPM APT CAPM APT CAPM APT

European **0.612

0.050

**0.636

0.063

**1.236

0.054

**1.190

0.097

**0.951

0.072

**0.676

0.080Financial 0.0390.026

**0.0890.030

0.1040.055

Global **0.5440.075 **1.098

0.081 **1.186

0.090 0.002

0.0010.002

0.0010.003

0.0020.001

0.0020.002

0.0020.002

0.001News *0.547

0.229

*0.544

0.240

**0.566

0.137

**0.562

0.122

0.086

0.163

0.225

0.135

Adj. R 0.47 0.48 0.72 0.73 0.50 0.57


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Cont.Postannouncement: 26.07.2012 25.07.2013 Austria Belgium Finland France CAPM APT CAPM APT CAPM APT CAPM A

European **0.735

0.078

**0.643

0.091

**0.870

0.106

**0.734

0.117

**0.502

0.091

**0.449

0.108

**0.845

0.107

**

0Financial 0.0060.046

0.0330.039

0.0340.050

00

Global **0.7200.095 **0.895

0.079 **0.472

0.086 **

0 *0.003

0.001**0.0040.001

0.0010.001

**0.0030.001

0.0020.001

**0.0030.001

0.0000.001

00

News 0.0580.117

0.070

0.126

0.107

0.281

0.113

0.293

*0.236

0.118

0.236

0.135

0.158

0.281

0

0

Adj. R 0.41 0.43 0.49 0.52 0.24 0.25 0.46 0 Ireland Italy Netherlands CAPM APT CAPM APT CAPM APT

European **0.7000.099

**0.6650.113

**1.0960.088

**1.0890.107

**0.6270.098

**0.5880.117

Financial 0.0060.045 0.065 0.048 0.059

0.031Global **0.5930.105

**0.8110.067

**0.5380.073

*0.0030.001

**0.0050.001

0.0020.002

0.0020.001

0.0000.001

0.0020.001

News 0.0540.177

0.075

0.206

0.115

0.683

0.144

0.722

0.142

0.241

0.105

0.265

Adj. R 0.47 0.47 0.45 0.44 0.40 0.40 Notes: The table reports results of the OLS estimation of the CAPM, equation (3), that controls for European sovere

counterpart that additionally controls for global sovereign risk and European financial risk. Autocorrelation and heteroskederrors are reported in parentheses. ** and * denote significant coefficients at the 1% and 5% level, respectively.


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Table 5.

Spainspecific news effects on Eurozone sovereign DS spreads:

1year window analysis.Preannouncement:

26.01.2012 25.07.2012Postannouncement:

26.07.2012 25.01.2013

CAPM APT CAPM APTAustria **0.354

0.124**0.2990.109

0.0230.133

0.0230.134

Belgium **0.4720.106

**0.4470.112

0.0290.375

0.0630.376

Finland 0.5210.324

0.4450.379

0.1210.142

0.0540.142

France **0.5630.214

*0.5260.220

0.1430.227

0.2500.271

Germany 0.224

0.207

0.140

0.170

0.106

0.414

0.025

0.428Ireland *1.0310.481

0.9390.494

0.0620.202

0.1550.240

Italy **0.5360.130

**0.4590.076

0.7330.905

0.8201.010

Netherlands **0.6300.214

**0.5600.197

0.0840.309

0.0080.321

Portugal *0.4620.231

0.4480.249

0.0440.220

0.3050.229

Notes: The table reports results of the OLS estimation of the CAPM, equation (3), that controls forEuropean sovereign risk and the extended APT-type counterpart that additionally controls for global

sovereign risk and European financial risk. Autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity robust Newey-Weststandard errors are reported in parentheses. ** and * denote significant coefficients at the 1% and 5%

level, respectively.

ecb policy eurozone fragility saka fuertes kalotychou

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