Institutional quality and sovereign credit default swap spreads

We examine how the quality of political, legal, and regulatory institutions impacts sovereign risk premia. An improvement in institutional quality significantly lowers a country's sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spread, even after controlling for domestic and global macroeconomic factors. The incremental effect of institutional quality may also be economically important in explaining the variations in the level of sovereign CDS spreads. The basic results are robust to alternative model specifications, samples, control variables, measures of institutional quality, estimation methods, and controls for endogeneity. Overall, the evidence suggests that institutional quality may play a significant role in explaining sovereign CDS spreads.     

欧洲主权债务危机及其影响

2010年2月初以来,随着美国次贷危机对各国经济的影响逐步消退、世界经济复苏越来越明显,欧洲主权债务危机开始进入人们的视野,国际金融市场出现震荡。欧洲主权债务危机对我国的影响主要是间接性的汇率风险,即我国巨额外汇储备中欧元部分的趋势性贬值风险。但是,我国应未雨绸缪,提早做好准备,主动积极应对欧洲主权债务危机。     

Sovereign default, interest rates and political uncertainty in emerging markets

A large body of the empirical literature shows that high turnover rates/length of tenure of policymakers and the degree of conflict within a country affects sovereign spreads, debt and default rates. We help to rationalize such claims by including these political features in a dynamic stochastic small open economy model of sovereign debt and default. In this way we offer a complementary approach to the econometric analyses in the literature. Consistent with the data, the quantitative analysis shows that politically unstable and more polarized economies experience higher default rates and larger level and volatility of sovereign interest rate spreads.     

Sovereign default and debt renegotiation

This paper develops a small open economy model to study sovereign default and debt renegotiation for emerging economies. The model features both endogenous default and endogenous debt recovery rates. Sovereign bonds are priced to compensate creditors for the risk of default and the risk of debt restructuring. The model captures the interaction between sovereign default and ex post debt renegotiation. We find that both debt recovery rates and sovereign bond prices decrease with the level of debt. In a quantitative analysis, the model accounts for the debt reduction, volatile and countercyclical bond spreads, countercyclical trade balance, and other empirical regularities of the Argentine economy. The model also replicates the dynamics of bond spreads during the debt crisis in Argentina.     

主权债务危机早期预警系统研究——基于BP神经网络方法

文章运用BP神经网络方法,构建了主权债务危机早期预警系统。通过对1991-2006年54个发展中国家宏观经济及债务状况数据的实证研究发现,该系统能对未来三年内出现的主权债务危机事件起到较好的预警作用,预警总体效果达86.7%。同时,与二元Logistic模型进行预测对比,发现运用人工神经网络方法对主权债务危机进行预警比二元Logistic方法具有相对优势。     

Sovereign risk and procyclical fiscal policy in emerging market economies

This study develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to account for the differences in fiscal policy stance over the business cycle between developed and emerging market countries, and, in particular, for the volatile and procyclical government consumption and transfer payment in emerging market countries. Two models with and without default option in sovereign borrowings replicate the contrasting cyclical behaviors indicating that the default option is responsible for procyclical fiscal policy. Further, augmented model with third-party bailouts, together with the stochastic trend income process, successfully predicts high volatilities of fiscal expenditures. These imply that procyclical fiscal policy, entailed by default option, may exacerbate the business cycle in emerging market countries.     

欧债危机与欧洲货币一体化:基于制度变迁的因素分析

欧洲债务危机是由主权债务违约所引发的区域性信用危机,其产生的原因是复杂而深刻的。从推动欧洲货币制度变迁的因素角度出发,分析了欧债危机爆发的原因,认为欧债危机是欧洲货币一体化过程中政治因素主导的强制性制度变迁所引发的必然后果。其解决方法应当是,建立一个统一的政治协调机制,或者让渡政治因素在欧洲货币制度变迁过程中的主导地位,使经济因素更为自主地发挥调节作用。     

中国政府及国有企业在美国法院面临的主权豁免问题分析——兼评美国Walters夫妇就“中国制造”手枪质量问题导致儿子死亡告中华人民共和国政府缺席判决执行案

美国Walters夫妇就"中国制造"手枪质量问题导致儿子死亡告中华人民共和国政府,美国密苏里州西区联邦法院用缺席判决判中国政府赔偿1000万美元。美国Walters夫妇要求扣留中国工商银行纽约分行等3家银行中相应的中国政府财产,美国纽约州南区联邦法院以该财产不在美国境内为由,驳回原告要求。2010年3月,美国原告提起上诉。本案仍然在进行中。本文通过对本案的分析,引出中国政府及国有企业在美国法院面临的主权豁免问题的分析,如中国政府在主权豁免案中可引用的抗辩理由;中国国有企业援引主权豁免的利弊;执行国有企业中相应财产问题。本文旨在引起学术界进一步关注在司法实践中涉及中国的主权豁免问题。     

The near-death experience of the celtic tiger

This article narrates Ireland’s recent odyssey from the pride and envy of Europe to kneeling supplicant through the eyes of an econometric model of the government bond market. The exercise suggests that, in essence, two developments triggered and propelled Ireland’s drift towards sovereign default: first, the global financial crisis that drove Ireland into a severe recession with collapsing tax revenues and increasing unemployment; second, a gap between the post-2007 increase in sovereign default risk that can actually be linked to macroeconomic fundamentals and the much bigger increase in perceived risk reflected by high interest rates and communicated by the massive downgrades of Ireland’s sovereign debt rating.     

On the political determinants of sovereign risk: Evidence from a Markov-switching vector autoregressive model for Argentina

While empirical sovereign credit risk models have portrayed default as driven mainly by economic and financial risk factors, this investigation addresses the relative importance of political risk that the empirical literature has often overlooked. A Markov-switching vector autoregressive model is applied to data from the Republic of Argentina to assess the timing and thresholds of the dynamic system. Results show the significance of political factors in explaining sovereign risk for Argentina, and demonstrate the feasibility and value of the proposed methodology.     

INCORPORATING RISK AND AMBIGUITY AVERSION INTO A HYBRID MODEL OF DEFAULT

It is well known that purely structural models of default cannot explain short‐term credit spreads, while purely intensity‐based models lead to completely unpredictable default events. Here we introduce a hybrid model of default, in which a firm enters a “distressed” state once its nontradable credit worthiness index hits a critical level. The distressed firm then defaults upon the next arrival of a Poisson process. To value defaultable bonds and credit default swaps (CDSs), we introduce the concept of robust indifference pricing. This paradigm incorporates both risk aversion and model uncertainty. In robust indifference pricing, the optimization problem is modified to include optimizing over a set of candidate measures, in addition to optimizing over trading strategies, subject to a measure dependent penalty. Using our model and valuation framework, we derive analytical solutions for bond yields and CDS spreads, and find that while ambiguity aversion plays a similar role to risk aversion, it also has distinct effects. In particular, ambiguity aversion allows for significant short‐term spreads.     

新冠肺炎疫情后各国主权债务风险及其前景

新冠肺炎疫情及其经济冲击促使许多国家财政赤字率和政府债务率大幅升高,其影响程度超过了2008年国际金融危机。笔者既不赞成现代货币理论(MMT)的看法,也不认同悲观派的看法。从影响各国主权债务风险的几大因素看,一些新兴市场经济体尤其需要关注利率的3种风险溢价:通胀风险溢价、货币贬值风险溢价和信誉(违约风险)溢价。展望未来,发达经济体和新兴市场经济体将花费数年时间进行财政收支和政府债务调整,以渐进方式推进政府部门的去杠杆。     

Debt Restructuring and Economic Recovery: Analysing the Argentine Swap

When Argentine sovereign default in December 2001 led to a collapse of the peso, the burden of dollar debt became demonstrably unsustainable. But it was not clear what restructuring was feasible, nor when. Eventually, in 2005 after a delay of more than three years, a super‐majority of creditors accepted a swap that essentially involved the ‘pesification’ of dollar liabilities. With the IMF not playing its customary role in arranging a swap, we consider whether a bilateral bargaining approach can help explain the final settlement and the delay in achieving it. We find that the swap broadly corresponds to a bargaining outcome where substantial delay occurred for both political and economic reasons. Even after political legitimacy was assured by general elections, negotiators seeking a sustainable outcome – at a time of deep recession, profound currency under‐valuation and high sovereign spreads – realised it was better to wait before settling. Other factors discussed include the definition of sustainability criteria, the effect of inter‐creditor conflict and the role of third parties in promoting ‘good faith’ bargaining. We suggest that, while these issues need further investigation, there are institutional changes that could make them less problematic.     

Von der Staatsverschuldung zum Staatsbankrott?

The increase of sovereign debt and the crisis in the Eurozone led to a public discussion about the possibility and the causes of a sovereign default. This paper shows by looking at the development in the Eurozone that for a government defaulting on its debt the amount of sovereign debt is not crucial; the essential question is whether a government is able to borrow in its own currency and — if that is not the case — the amount of international debt of the whole country. This leads to important conclusions for European economic policy.     

European Sovereign Debt Crisis's Influence and Enlightenment on China

对中国的欧洲主权债务危机从形成到逐步影响中国的各个方面进行详尽分析和探讨,包括对汇率、对外贸易、金融政策等的影响,指出应以欧洲主权债务危机为戒,改进中国地方政府债务的监管体制。     

What Can the Developed World Learn from the Latin American Debt and Mexican Peso Crisis?

The global financial crisis of 2007–08 resulted from massive institutional failure and proved that a robust regulatory and supervisory frameworks are necessary. Such frameworks are not yet in place. This paper recounts the legacy of the financial crisis in the sovereign debt crisis in Greece as of September 2011. It then turns to comparing the current situation to those of Latin America, and especially Mexico, in the 1980s. It describes what was done to recover in Latin America and what lessons can and cannot be learned from those experiences in acting to assist the countries of the European Union threatened with sovereign debt default.     

Fighting debt explosion in the European sovereign debt crisis

A number of tools have been suggested for solving the European sovereign debt crisis, in particular the options of leveraging the EFSF/ESM, introducing Eurobonds and a European Troubled Asset Relief Programme (Euro-TARP). However, it is unclear how these instruments will work, given jittery financial markets, the pending sovereign default of Greece and the fear of contagion among other countries. In the following paper, these policy tools will be analysed and evaluated with respect to their effects as well as their potential power to solve the debt crisis.     

Quantification of sovereign risk: Using the information in equity market prices

This paper proposes a new approach to quantify the sovereign risk. We use the information of the stock price index as a proxy for the equity value of the country, and introduce a size parameter, which is a conversion factor of the stock price index to the equity value of the country, and adopted the extended Black–Scholes–Merton option-pricing model for the calculation of the probability of default. Our model is applied on two countries, Argentina as the case of debt crisis and Thailand as currency crisis. We demonstrated a capability of our model as an early warning indicator for both crises.     

External Public Debt,Trade Linkages and Contagion During the Eurozone Crisis

Against the backdrop of the contagion literature, the paper analyses the impact of financial and trade linkages on sovereign bond spreads in the Eurozone crisis. Using quarterly data for a sample of EMU countries during the period 2000–13, we estimate fixed‐effect panel models with Driscoll and Kraay standard errors that are robust to general forms of spatial and temporal dependence. Our main results can be summarised as follows: first, we suggest that the ‘sudden stop’ of capital inflow towards the peripheral sovereign debt triggered a re‐segmentation of financial markets and economic systems along national borders, with negative implications for risk‐sharing and the efficient allocation of capital. The ‘home bias’ effect – that is the increase in the share of sovereign debt held by domestic banks – worsened the country‐specific risk because the twin crisis (sovereign and banking) began to be conceived as more closely intertwined within countries than before. Second, the structure of international trade helps to account for the geographic scope of contagion, even after controlling for macroeconomic and fiscal vulnerabilities. Finally, the ‘substitution effect’ of public debt securities of stand‐alone emerging countries has affected more the sovereign spreads in the core than in the periphery.     

Assessing credit quality from the equity market: can a structural approach forecast credit ratings?

We investigate the empirical performance of default probability prediction based on Merton's (1974) structural credit risk model. More specifically, we study if distance‐to‐default is a sufficient statistic for the equity market information concerning the credit quality of the debt‐issuing firm. We show that a simple reduced form model outperforms the Merton (1974) model for both in‐sample fitting and out‐of‐sample predictability for credit ratings, and that both can be greatly improved by including the firm's equity value as an additional variable. Moreover, the empirical performance of this hybrid model is very similar to that of the simple reduced form model. As a result, we conclude that distant‐to‐default alone does not adequately capture the firm's credit quality information from the equity market. Copyright © 2007 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.