2000
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Anne Frémont et al., « Discrimination par le marché entre les dettes des États membres de l'UEM », Revue de l'OFCE, ID : 10.3406/ofce.2000.1569
What will become of the interest spreads on the debts of different sovereign borrowers under EMU ? Will these always be small and merely reflect differences in liquidity, as they do today, or will they progressively widen and also reflect default risk? Such are the questions posed in this study. We offer a variety of reasons for doubting that the current convergence of interest rates in the euro zone constitutes a permanent situation. Prominent among these is a large set of new data of our own construction concerning the spreads on the debts of lower-level governments, or governments without money-issuing power, for a dozen countries. Those spreads clearly give rise to the suspicion that default-risk premia may reappear in the yields on the debts of different sovereigns in EMU. JEL Codes : E43, E60, F36