Fiscal retrenchments and the transmission mechanism of the sovereign risk channel for highly indebted countries

We formalize sovereign and private sector default probabilities into a monetary model in order to test the hypothesis, which recently appeared in the literature, of whether the consideration of a sovereign risk channel affects the sign and size of output fiscal multipliers. The model is estimated fort he most vulnerable Euro-zone countries -characterized by high debt-to-GDP ratio- and stochastically simulated conditional on expenditure and revenue policy measures. We show that, conditional on specific fiscal shocks, the risk channel can operate in a pro-cyclical direction, amplifying the temporary contractionary effects of fiscal retrenchments. We show that both the relations between economic fundamentals and sovereign debt spreads and that between sovereign and credit spreads are weak. Therefore, the effectiveness of the risk channel for fiscal consolidations is small, irrespective of the direction of change in the sovereign default probability.