Causality and Contagion in EMU Sovereign Bonds Revisited: Novel Evidence from Nonlinear Causality Tests

Vassilios Babalos, Clement Kyei and Evangelos Poutos ()
Additional contact information
Evangelos Poutos: Department of Social Sciences, Hellenic Open University, Greece
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Rangan Gupta

No 201514, Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates the possible existence of Granger-causal relationships in the behavior of sovereign bond markets within the European Monetary Union (EMU), with special focus on higher order causality accounting for nonlinear dependence between the variables. With the above in mind both traditional linear and the nonlinear variants of the Granger causality test are conducted. An extensive sample of yields on 10-year sovereign bonds issued by 12 EMU countries and USA over the period running from January 2000 to June of 2014 is employed. Our findings reveal interesting causality patterns both at first and second order moment of sovereign yields. In particular, a bi-directional causality in mean and variance within the group of the southern Europe countries and a weak evidence of causality both in mean and variance running from southern to northern Europe sovereign yields is observed. Our results entail significant policy implications for market regulators and bond portfolio investors and useful insights for researchers interested in the developments of EMU sovereign debt markets.

Keywords: Sovereign debt; European Monetary Union; Linear causality; Nonlinear causality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C22 C32 G12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pre:wpaper:201514

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rangan Gupta ().