IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/may/mayecw/n830498.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Fiscal Policy and the Term Premium in Real Interest Rate Differentials

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas J. Flavin

    (Economics, National University of Ireland, Maynooth)

  • Michele G. Limosani

    (Universita di Messina, Italy.)

Abstract

This paper seeks to identify the source of the risk premium in real interest rate differentials across European countries. In particular, we examine the link between real interest rate differentials, existing between various European countries and Germany, and domestic fiscal policy as proxied by the Debt/GDP ratios in these countries. Our results provide strong evidence that this variable exerts a significant influence on the determination of both the level and the volatility of the differential for both long term and short term interest rates. This is a noteworthy result bearing in mind the Maastricht criteria for European Monetary Union and the importance attached to convergence of Debt/GDP ratios.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas J. Flavin & Michele G. Limosani, 1998. "Fiscal Policy and the Term Premium in Real Interest Rate Differentials," Economics Department Working Paper Series n830498, Department of Economics, National University of Ireland - Maynooth.
    • Handle: RePEc:may:mayecw:n830498
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repec.maynoothuniversity.ie/mayecw-files/N830498.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrew Clare & Raymond O'Brien & Stephen Thomas & Michael Wickens, "undated". "Macroeconomic Shocks and the Domestic CAPM: Evidence from the UK Stock Market," Discussion Papers 94/10, Department of Economics, University of York.
    2. Thoms, S. H., 1993. "An international CAPM for bonds and equities," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 390-412, August.
    3. J. Tobin, 1958. "Liquidity Preference as Behavior Towards Risk," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 25(2), pages 65-86.
    4. Frankel, Jeffrey A., 1982. "In search of the exchange risk premium: A six-currency test assuming mean-variance optimization," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 1(1), pages 255-274, January.
    5. Frankel, Jeffrey A. & MacArthur, Alan T., 1988. "Political vs. currency premia in international real interest differentials : A study of forward rates for 24 countries," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 32(5), pages 1083-1114, June.
    6. Engel, Charles & Rodrigues, Anthony P, 1989. "Tests of International CAPM with Time-Varying Covariances," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 4(2), pages 119-138, April-Jun.
    7. Tobin, James, 1982. "Money and Finance in the Macroeconomic Process," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 14(2), pages 171-204, May.
    8. Bollerslev, Tim, 1986. "Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 307-327, April.
    9. Engel, Charles M & Rodrigues, Anthony P, 1993. "Tests of Mean-Variance Efficiency of International Equity Markets," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 45(3), pages 403-421, July.
    10. Harry Markowitz, 1952. "Portfolio Selection," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 7(1), pages 77-91, March.
    11. Markowitz, Harry M, 1991. "Foundations of Portfolio Theory," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(2), pages 469-477, June.
    12. Engle, Robert F, 1982. "Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity with Estimates of the Variance of United Kingdom Inflation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(4), pages 987-1007, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Thomas J. Flavin & Michele G. Limosani, 2000. "Explaining European Short-term Interest Rate Differentials: An Application of Tobin's Portfolio Theory," Economics Department Working Paper Series n1000500, Department of Economics, National University of Ireland - Maynooth.
    2. Flavin, Thomas J. & Limosani, Michele G., 2007. "Fiscal, monetary policy and the conditional risk premium in short-term interest rate differentials: an application of Tobin's portfolio theory," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 101-112.
    3. Marc Hayford, 2005. "Fiscal policy and national saving," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 37(9), pages 981-992.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Flavin, Thomas J. & Limosani, Michele G., 2007. "Fiscal, monetary policy and the conditional risk premium in short-term interest rate differentials: an application of Tobin's portfolio theory," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 101-112.
    2. W. Jos Jansen, 1998. "The mean-variance model with capital controls and expectations formation. A test on German portfolio data," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(4), pages 333-346.
    3. Antonio Díaz & Carlos Esparcia, 2021. "Dynamic optimal portfolio choice under time-varying risk aversion," International Economics, CEPII research center, issue 166, pages 1-22.
    4. Engel, Charles, 1996. "The forward discount anomaly and the risk premium: A survey of recent evidence," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 123-192, June.
    5. Jochen Güntner & Benjamin Karner, 2020. "Hedging with commodity futures and the end of normal Backwardation," Economics working papers 2020-21, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    6. Tim Bollerslev & Ray Y. Chou & Narayanan Jayaraman & Kenneth F. Kroner - L, 1991. "es modéles ARCH en finance : un point sur la théorie et les résultats empiriques," Annals of Economics and Statistics, GENES, issue 24, pages 1-59.
    7. Engel, Charles & Frankel, Jeffrey A. & Froot, Kenneth A. & Rodrigues, Anthony P., 1995. "Tests of conditional mean-variance efficiency of the U.S. stock market," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 3-18, March.
    8. Andrew Clare & Raymond O'Brien & Peter Smith & Stephen Thomas, 1996. "Global macroeconomic shocks, time-varying covariances and tests of the international CAPM," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(2), pages 109-113.
    9. Marco Taboga, 2014. "The Riskiness of Corporate Bonds," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 46(4), pages 693-713, June.
    10. Cathy W. S. Chen & Muyi Li & Nga T. H. Nguyen & Songsak Sriboonchitta, 2017. "On Asymmetric Market Model with Heteroskedasticity and Quantile Regression," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 49(1), pages 155-174, January.
    11. Ngo, Vu Minh & Nguyen, Huan Huu & Van Nguyen, Phuc, 2023. "Does reinforcement learning outperform deep learning and traditional portfolio optimization models in frontier and developed financial markets?," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    12. K. Giannopoulos, 1995. "Estimating the time Varying Components of international stock markets' risk," The European Journal of Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 1(2), pages 129-164.
    13. Bai, Xiwen & Lam, Jasmine Siu Lee, 2021. "Freight rate co-movement and risk spillovers in the product tanker shipping market: A copula analysis," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 149(C).
    14. Thomas Chiang & Sheng-Yung Yang, 2005. "International Asset Excess Returns and Multivariate Conditional Volatilities," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 24(3), pages 295-312, May.
    15. Chia-Lin Chang & Jukka Ilomäki & Hannu Laurila & Michael McAleer, 2018. "Long Run Returns Predictability and Volatility with Moving Averages," Risks, MDPI, vol. 6(4), pages 1-18, September.
    16. Frankel, Jeffrey A., 1988. "Recent estimates of time-variation in the conditional variance and in the exchange risk premium," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 7(1), pages 115-125, March.
    17. Hunjra, Ahmed Imran & Azam, Muhammad & Niazi, Ghulam Shabbir Khan & Butt, Babar Zaheer & Rehman, Kashif-Ur- & Azam, Rauf i, 2010. "Risk and return relationship in stock market and commodity prices: a comprehensive study of Pakistani markets," MPRA Paper 40662, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Michele Costola & Massimiliano Caporin, 2016. "Rational Learning For Risk-Averse Investors By Conditioning On Behavioral Choices," Annals of Financial Economics (AFE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 11(01), pages 1-26, March.
    19. Cathy W. S. Chen & Richard H. Gerlach & Ann M. H. Lin, 2011. "Multi-regime nonlinear capital asset pricing models," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(9), pages 1421-1438, April.
    20. Vladimir Rankovic & Mikica Drenovak & Branko Uroševic & Ranko Jelic, 2016. "Mean Univariate-GARCH VaR Portfolio Optimization: Actual Portfolio Approach," CESifo Working Paper Series 5731, CESifo.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:may:mayecw:n830498. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/demayie.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.