Fool the markets? Creative accounting, fiscal transparency and sovereign risk premia

Kerstin Bernoth () and Guntram Wolff

DNB Working Papers from Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department

Abstract: We investigate the effects of official fiscal data and creative accounting signals on interest rate spreads between bond yields in the European Union. Our model predicts that risk premia contained in government bond spreads should increase in both, the official fiscal position and the expected "creative" part of fiscal policy. The relative importance of these two signals depends on the transparency of the country. Greater transparency reduces risk premia. The empirical results confirm the hypotheses. Creative accounting increases the spread. The increase of the risk premium is stronger if financial markets are unsure about the true extent of creative accounting. Fiscal transparency reduces risk premia. Instrumental variable egressions confirm these results by addressing potential reverse causality problems and measurement bias.

Keywords: Risk premia; government bond yields; creative accounting; stock-flow adjustments; gimmickry; transparency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 E62 F34 G12 H6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-fin, nep-fmk, nep-mac and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dnb.nl/binaries/Working%20Paper%20103_tcm46-146760.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (https://www.dnb.nl/binaries/Working%20Paper%20103_tcm46-146760.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.dnb.nl/binaries/working%20paper%20103_tcm46-146760.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: FOOL THE MARKETS? CREATIVE ACCOUNTING, FISCAL TRANSPARENCY AND SOVEREIGN RISK PREMIA (2008)
Working Paper: Fool the Markets? Creative Accounting, Fiscal Transparency and Sovereign Risk Premia (2006)
Working Paper: Fool the markets? Creative accounting, fiscal transparency and sovereign risk premia (2006)
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:dnb:dnbwpp:103

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DNB Working Papers from Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Richard Heuver ().