ECB Policy and Eurozone Fragility: Was De Grauwe Right? ORKUN SAKA*, ANA-MARIA FUERTES and ELENA KALOTYCHOU Cass Business School, City University London, U.K First draft: November 2013; This draft: May 2014 Abstract De Grauwe’s Eurozone fragility hypothesis states that member countries of a monetary union are highly vulnerable to a self‐fulfilling mechanism by which the efforts of investors to avoid losses from default can end up triggering the very default they fear. We test this hypothesis by applying an eclectic methodology to a time window around Draghi’s “whatever‐it‐takes” pledge on July 26, 2012 which was soon after followed by the actual announcement of the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program. The principal components of Eurozone credit default spreads (CDS) validate this choice of break date. An event study reveals significant pre‐announcement contagion from Spain to Italy, Belgium, France and Austria. Furthermore, the analysis of time‐series regression residuals confirms frequent clusters of large bad shocks to the CDS spreads of the above four Eurozone countries but soley during the pre‐announcement period. Our findings support the Eurozone fragility hypothesis and endorse the OMT program. Keywords: Sovereign debt; Eurozone; European Central Bank; Outright Monetary Transactions; Self-fulfilling panic. JEL classification: E44, F36, G15, C52. _____________________________________________________________________ * Corresponding author. Cass Business School, 24 Chiswell Street London, EC1Y 4UE United Kingdom; Tel: +44 (0)75 9306 9236;
[email protected]. † We are grateful to Paul De Grauwe, José-Luis Peydró and Christian Wagner for their useful comments and suggestions. We also thank participants at the Young Finance Scholars’ Conference and Quantitative Finance Workshop at the University of Sussex (May 2014), and seminar participants at Cass Business School, Keele University and Brunel University.