This paper studies the interaction between fiscal policy and bondholders against the backdrop of high sovereign debt levels. For our analysis, we investigate the case of Italy, a country that has dealt with high public debt levels for a long time. We derive an external instrument for bond demand shocks from a novel news ticker data set to address the empirical challenge of pinning down political uncertainty and investors’ forward-looking behavior. We further derive a fiscal rule and a bond demand schedule from theory and incorporate them alongside the instrument in a Bayesian structural VAR model. Our main results are threefold. First, the interaction between fiscal policy and bondholders’ expectations is critical for the evolution of prices. Fiscal policy reinforces contractionary monetary policy through sustained increases in primary surpluses and investors provide incentives for ``passive’’ fiscal policy. Second, investors’ expectations matter for inflation, and we document a Fisherian response of inflation across all maturities in response to a bond demand shock. Third, political risk is critical in the determination of bondholders’ expectations and an increase in the perceived riskiness of sovereign debt increases inflation and thus complicates the task of controlling price growth.

We show that global supply and demand shocks are important drivers of interest rate co-movement across seven advanced economies. Beyond that, local structural shocks transmit internationally via aggregate demand channels, and central banks react predominantly to domestic macroeconomic developments. Unexpected monetary policy tightening decreases most foreign interest rates, while expansionary local supply and demand shocks increase them. To disentangle determinants of international interest rate co-movement, we use a Bayesian structural panel vector autoregressive model accounting for latent global supply and demand shocks. We identify country-specific structural shocks via informative prior distributions based on a standard theoretical multi-country open economy model.

This paper contributes to a better understanding of the important role that credit demand plays for credit markets and aggregate macroeconomic developments as both a source and transmitter of economic shocks. I am the first to identify a structural credit demand equation together with credit supply, aggregate supply, demand and monetary policy in a Bayesian structural VAR. The model combines informative priors on structural coefficients and multiple external instruments to achieve identification. In order to improve identification of the credit demand shocks, I construct a new granular instrument from regional mortgage origination. I find that credit demand is quite elastic with respect to contemporaneous macroeconomic conditions, while credit supply is relatively inelastic. I show that credit supply and demand shocks matter for aggregate fluctuations, albeit at different times. Credit demand shocks mostly drove the boom prior to the financial crisis, while credit supply shocks were responsible during and after the crisis itself. In an out-of-sample exercise, I find that the Covid pandemic induced a large expansion of credit demand in 2020Q2, which pushed the US economy towards a sustained recovery and helped to avoid a stagflationary scenario in 2022.