Against the background of the current debate about fiscal sustainability in several advanced economies, this paper estimates determinants of G7 sovereign bond spreads, using high-frequency proxies for market expectations about macroeconomic fundamentals and allowing for time-varying parameters. The paper finds substantial asymmetry in the importance of country fundamentals and considerable time variations in the pricing of risks. There has been a reduced pricing of several risk factors in the years preceding the financial crisis, and either an over-pricing of risk or the pricing of a re-denomination risk of euro area bonds during the European sovereign debt crisis, a pattern that does not apply to the non-euro area G7 bonds.

The end result of major sporting events has been shown to affect next day stock returns through shifts in investor mood. By studying intraday data during the soccer matches that led to the elimination of France and Italy from the 2010 FIFA World Cup, we test whether mood-related pricing effects already materialize as events unfold. We use data for a cross-listed firm, which allows for a straightforward identification of underpricing. During the matches, the firm’s stock is underpriced by up to 7 basis points in the country that eventually loses. The probability of underpricing increases as elimination becomes more likely.

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication—mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this ever-growing literature. The evidence suggests that communication can be an important and powerful part of the central bank's toolkit since it has the ability to move financial markets, to enhance the predictability of monetary policy decisions, and potentially to help achieve central banks' macroeconomic objectives. However, the large variation in communication strategies across central banks suggests that a consensus has yet to emerge on what constitutes an optimal communication strategy.

ABSTRACT We analyze the transmission of the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis to 415 country‐industry equity portfolios. We use a factor model to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings and residual correlations as indicative of contagion. While we find evidence of contagion from the United States and the global financial sector, the effects are small. By contrast, there has been substantial contagion from domestic markets to individual domestic portfolios, with its severity inversely related to the quality of countries’ economic fundamentals. This confirms the “wake‐up call” hypothesis, with markets focusing more on country‐specific characteristics during the crisis.