This paper quantifies how European sovereign bond yields responded to policy news about Russian state assets (their immobilisation and subsequent decisions on the use). The obtained results are used to analyse the potential EU markets’ reactions if full confiscation is pursued.
We assemble a dated news sample validated with investor attention (Google Trends) and estimate announcement effects on 2-, 10-, and 30-year bond yields (country-specific systemic risk proxy) using multi-window event studies, two-way bootstrap confidence bands, and a placebo (Monte-Carlo) design that draws pseudo-events from non-event periods. To assess persistence of the shock, we extend inference to 60 trading days (with PCA used to extract a common EU factor and a Bayesian-inspired bootstrap).
European sovereign yields do react to announcements on Russian assets, but the scale is moderate. At the aggregate level, usage news produces a coordinated rise in 10Y yields that builds between days +2 and +4 and remains elevated through about day +5.
The peak single-day effect stays below 30 bps. 2Y moves are small and short-lived, and 30Y changes are generally modest with wide intervals. Immobilisation news, by contrast, elicits only limited short-run movements at the aggregate level, with many estimates close to zero.
Country-level results refine this picture. Usage announcements prompt a continental rise in 10Y yields, with many countries showing day-5 increases whose confidence intervals lie entirely above zero. By contrast, 2Y moves are small and often statistically indistinguishable from zero by day +5.
At the ultra-long end, only a few issuers (most notably France, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and Greece) register clear day-5 increases, and these are noticeably smaller than at 10Y. Taken together, the repricing is concentrated in the belly of the curve, indicating a temporary lift in medium-term premia rather than a broad shift of the whole curve.
Benchmarked against well-studied European shocks, these effects are comparable to typical CRA-downgrade announcements and far below crisis-episode repricing. Extending the horizon to 60 trading days with the PCA-filtering and Bayesian-inspired window design shows brief runs of significance that fade rather than cumulate, indicating little medium-run persistence.
Because markets price usage decisions chiefly through medium-term term premia, authorities should emphasise legal design, governance of proceeds, and implementation sequencing in advance of announcements. Debt-management offices can limit issuance-cost drift by tilting near the announcement period toward short-to-intermediate tenors and scheduling long placements for calmer windows.
Coordination across EU and G7 institutions matters: aligned messaging and timelines lower uncertainty premia across countries and reduce cross-border spillovers. Finally, monitoring a small set of more sensitive sovereigns around usage news can help contain transitory volatility while preserving orderly market functioning.
The research was conducted with support of the International Rennaissance Foundation.
