Sovereign Default,Domestic Banks,and Financial Institutions

We present a model of sovereign debt in which, contrary to conventional wisdom, government defaults are costly because they destroy the balance sheets of domestic banks. In our model, better financial institutions allow banks to be more leveraged, thereby making them more vulnerable to sovereign defaults. Our predictions: government defaults should lead to declines in private credit, and these declines should be larger in countries where financial institutions are more developed and banks hold more government bonds. In these same countries, government defaults should be less likely. Using a large panel of countries, we find evidence consistent with these predictions.     

Institutional Environment and Sovereign Credit Ratings

We use a sample of 86 counties to examine the cross-sectional determinants of sovereign credit ratings. We find that the quality of a country's legal and political institutions plays a vital role in determining these ratings. A one-standard-deviation increase in our legal environment index results in an average credit rating increase of 0.466 standard deviations, even when we control for obvious factors such as GDP per capita, inflation, foreign debt per GDP, previous defaults, and general development. Although part of this effect is due to the legal environment's endogeneity, its relative importance is robust to endogeneity concerns.     

Governance and bank characteristics in the credit and sovereign debt crises – the impact of CEO power

The global financial sector recently suffered from two interrelated crises: the credit crisis and the sovereign debt crisis. A common question is whether the recent experience with the credit crisis has helped in dealing with the sovereign debt crisis. We study more specifically whether banks with powerful CEOs perform better or worse than other banks, and if there is any difference in this relationship between the two crises. Using unique hand-collected data for 378 large global banks, we find that CEO power has a significant positive relation to bank profitability and asset quality, but also to insolvency risk, during the sovereign debt crisis. Thus, strong CEOs do not appear to be detrimental to bank performance. Our results also support the idea that deposit insurance may have contributed to the credit crisis.     

Domestic Banks As Lightning Rods? Home Bias and Information during the Eurozone Crisis

European banks have been criticized for holding excessive domestic government debt during the recent Eurozone crisis, which may have intensified the diabolic loop between sovereign and bank credit risks. By using a novel bank-level data set covering the entire timeline of the Eurozone crisis, I first reconfirm that the crisis led to the reallocation of sovereign debt from foreign to domestic banks. In contrast to the recent literature focusing only on sovereign debt, I show that the banks' private-sector exposures were (at least) equally affected by the rise in home bias. Consistent with this pattern, I propose a new debt reallocation channel based on informational frictions and show that the informationally closer foreign banks increase their relative exposures when the sovereign risk rises. The effect of informational closeness is economically meaningful and robust to the use of different information measures and controls for alternative channels of sovereign debt reallocation.     

A comprehensive approach to measuring the relation between systemic risk exposure and sovereign debt

Using an integrated model to control for simultaneity, as well as new risk measurement techniques such as Adapted Exposure CoVaR and Marginal Expected Shortfall (MES), we show that the aggregate systemic risk exposure of financial institutions is positively related to sovereign debt yields in European countries in an episodic manner, varying positively with the intensity of the financial crisis facing a particular nation. We find evidence of a simultaneous relation between systemic risk exposure and sovereign debt yields. This suggests that models of sovereign debt yields should also include the systemic risk of a country's financial system in order to avoid potentially important mis-specification errors. We find evidence that systemic risk of a country's financial institutions and the risk of sovereign governments are inter-related and shocks to these domestic linkages are stronger and longer lasting than international risk spillovers. Thus, the channel in which domestic sovereign debt yields can be affected by another nation's sovereign debt is mostly an indirect one in that shocks to a foreign country's government finances are transmitted to that country's financial system which, in turn, can spill over to the domestic financial system and, ultimately, have a destabilizing effect on the domestic sovereign debt market.     

Like Father Like Sons? The Cost of Sovereign Defaults in Reduced Credit to the Private Sector

We investigate the impact of sovereign defaults on the ability of the corporate sector in emerging nations to finance itself abroad. We test the hypothesis that sovereign defaults have a negative spillover onto the private sector through credit rationing. We explore a novel data set covering the majority of corporates in emerging nations that received foreign capital between 1880 and 1913. Results confirm that credit rationing existed, was very large, and persisted long beyond the default settlement. The private sector paid a severe cost for their governments’ debt intolerance, with negative implications for their growth.     

U.S. Monetary Policy and International Bond Markets

This paper analyzes how U.S. monetary policy affects the pricing of dollar‐denominated sovereign debt. We document that yields on dollar‐denominated sovereign bonds are highly responsive to U.S. monetary policy surprises—during both the conventional and unconventional policy regimes—and that the passthrough of unconventional policy to foreign bond yields is, on balance, comparable to that of conventional policy. In addition, a conventional U.S. monetary easing (tightening) leads to a significant narrowing (widening) of credit spreads on sovereign bonds issued by countries with a speculative‐grade credit rating but has no effect on the corresponding weighted average of bilateral exchange rates for a basket of currencies from the same set of risky countries; this indicates that an unanticipated tightening of U.S. monetary policy widens credit spreads on risky sovereign debt directly through the financial channel, as opposed to indirectly through the exchange rate channel. During the unconventional policy regime, yields on both investment‐ and speculative‐grade sovereign bonds move one‐to‐one with policy‐induced fluctuations in yields on comparable U.S. Treasuries. We also examine whether the response of sovereign credit spreads to US monetary policy differs between policy easings and tightenings and find no evidence of such asymmetry.     

Fiscal Transparency,Fiscal Performance and Credit Ratings

Fiscal transparency can provide policymakers with incentives to adopt better policies by enhancing the public debate on the design and sustainability of fiscal policy and establishing accountability for their implementation. Fiscal transparency can also reduce uncertainty about fiscal policy and fiscal outturns by providing more information on the underlying fiscal position and fiscal risks. Both effects suggest that countries should benefit from adopting transparency enhancing policies through better market assessments of their sovereign risk. In this paper, we investigate whether fiscal transparency has an effect on market perceptions of sovereign risk, as measured by sovereign credit ratings, and if so, through which channels. We find that fiscal transparency has a positive and significant effect on ratings – one standard deviation increase in fiscal transparency increases credit ratings by 0.7 and 1 notches (or steps in the credit rating scale) in advanced and developing economies, respectively – but its effect works through different channels in advanced and developing economies. In advanced economies, fiscal transparency is associated with better fiscal outcomes, leading indirectly to higher credit ratings. In developing economies, the direct uncertainty‐reducing effect of fiscal transparency seems to be more important. Indeed, the effect of fiscal transparency on fiscal performance is found to increase with the level of institutional development.     

Pricing Sovereign Credit Risk of Poland: Evidence from the CDS Market

We analyze the market assessment of sovereign credit risk using a reduced-form model to price the credit default swap (CDS) spreads, thus enabling us to derive values for the probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD) from the quotes of sovereign CDS contracts. We compare different specifications of the models allowing for both fixed and time-varying LGD, and we use these values to analyze the sovereign credit risk of Polish debt throughout the period of a global financial crisis. Our results suggest the presence of a low LGD and a relatively high PD during a recent financial crisis.     

Regime-Dependent Determinants of China’s Sovereign Credit Default Swap Spread

We study the determinants of China’s sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spread in a regime-switching framework. This framework allows us to identify potential cross-asset-class contagion from global financial markets to China. To avoid endogeneity biases coming from domestic costs of sovereign default, we model domestic financial indicators as endogenous variables and estimate the regime-switching model with instrumental variables. We find strong evidence of cross-asset-class contagion but no evidence of contagion from sovereign CDS markets of China’s major trade partners (the European Union, Japan, and the United States).     

信用与资本——开发性金融研究

资本是关系到当下和长远发展的重要命题,而信用是实现从财富到资本转化的关键要素。本文从四个维度考察信用与资本的关系。一是关于信用的产生和演进,指出了信用产生的两个必要条件,并从社会财富三个阶段来审视信用和资本相互作用的演进过程。二是信用的性质和功能。讨论了信用的基本性质,以及规范商品和资本交易、促进资本形成以及信用的金融功能等基础性功能,并进一步讨论了信用的证券化功能以及金融市场建设功能。三是当前信用体系面对的新挑战和新问题。首先提出了美元外汇储备在一定意义上是美元信用对中国储蓄的证券化,是全球信用美元化的组成,在资本匮乏阶段是必要选择,而当下需要对财富和资本寻找新的载体,需要考虑和实现减少对美元的依赖。其次,从深化对国家信用的运用角度对解决问题的路径进行了思考,初步提出了通过发行以国家信用为基础的股权证券化工具,解决长期资本不足问题,应对当前挑战的设想。四是在回顾和总结部分,本文指出,信用的形态会随着资本发展而不断演进,从个人到企业、国家再到国际,从债务信用升级为命运信用即股权信用,乃至尚未出现的国际股权信用,是未来信用发展的方向。     

The Real Effects of Credit Ratings: The Sovereign Ceiling Channel

We show that sovereign debt impairments can have a significant effect on financial markets and real economies through a credit ratings channel. Specifically, we find that firms reduce their investment and reliance on credit markets due to a rising cost of debt capital following a sovereign rating downgrade. We identify these effects by exploiting exogenous variation in corporate ratings due to rating agencies' sovereign ceiling policies, which require that firms' ratings remain at or below the sovereign rating of their country of domicile.     

社会信用、刚兑信仰与地方政府隐性债务

防范化解地方政府隐性债务风险是当前我国亟待解决的重要问题。本文基于2007年至2019年293个地级市面板数据,研究社会信用对地方政府隐性债务的影响。我们发现:(1)社会信用下滑会导致地方政府隐性债务规模提高和融资成本上升。(2)社会信用通过影响市场金融资源供给和政府债务需求进而影响隐性债务规模与融资成本,但上述机制在有无“刚兑信仰”情境下存在差异。(3)对比新《预算法》和“43号文”出台前后社会信用对隐性债务影响的异质性发现,债务管制显著提高了融资平台的市场化程度。虽然政策前期金融市场更多呈现出一种观望态度,但违约事件打破了金融市场对地方政府隐性债务的“刚兑信仰”,隐性债务发行受到的市场约束力度显著增强。本文对更好地认识地方政府隐性债务风险、理解当前债务治理措施的有效性以及未来如何通过完善社会信用体系建设化解地方政府隐性债务风险具有启示意义。     

当前国际政府债务问题的影响与警示

为应对席卷全球的国际金融危机,各国政府纷纷采取经济刺激措施,代替民间企业和金融机构承担危机成本,这不可避免带来一定的政府债务问题。随着时间的推移,部分政府债务问题逐步凸显,成为全球经济走出危机阴影的障碍。文章分析认为,当前国际上政府债务问题呈现脆弱性、复杂性、集中性和长期性特征,成为全球经济复苏的绊脚石,甚至会给世界各国经济带来灾难性影响。文章同时总结了国际政府债务问题带给我国的启示。     

我国的主权信用评级被低估了吗

本文以1996—2011年间45个国家的宏观经济数据和惠誉的主权信用评级数据,运用一般面板线性回归和有序概率模型研究了我国的主权信用评级是否被低估的问题。结果发现,国际评级机构并没有刻意低估我国的主权信用评级,其对我国主权信用评级的测算方法并不明显有别于其他国家。但是,由于评级体系的倾向性和我国地方政府债务不透明等原因,导致我国的主权信用评级客观上存在被低估的可能。     

An Empirical Study of International Spillover of Sovereign Risk to Bank Credit Risk

The severity and complexity of the recent financial crisis has motivated the need for understanding the relationships between sovereign ratings and bank credit ratings. This is the first study to examine the impact of the “international” spillover of sovereign risk to bank credit risk through both a ratings channel and an asset holdings channel. In the first case, the downgrade of sovereign ratings in GIIPS (Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) countries leads to rating downgrades of banks in the peripheral countries. The second channel indicates that larger asset holdings of GIIPS debt increases the credit risk of cross‐border banks, and hence, the probabilities of downgrade.     

Sovereign defaults by currency denomination

This paper explores the drivers of sovereign default in 100 countries over the period 1996–2012. We build a new data set of sovereign defaults and find that default events for local and foreign currency bonds are equally likely. However, governments default under different economic and financial conditions depending on the currency in which bonds are issued. The explained variation in default probability rises from 43% to 62% when we account for differences in currency denomination. We also provide evidence that global factors and market sentiment, which are known to drive sovereign spreads, do not help explain the probability of sovereign default. Hence, these factors appear to affect the price of sovereign credit risk, although not the risk itself.     

Corporate Credit Spreads and the Sovereign Ceiling in Latin America

We exploit a panel of 72 US dollar-denominated bonds issued by Latin American publicly listed firms between 1996 and 2004, a period of regional financial crises, to answer the following three questions: (1) Is sovereign risk a statistically and economically significant determinant of the corporate credit spread, controlling for firm- and bond-specific characteristics? (2) If yes, do market participants apply the sovereign ceiling rule adopted by rating agencies in the pricing of our bond market data? And (3) how do market views compare with the rating agencies ceiling policy for each corporate bond? We find strong evidence of an economically and statistically significant effect of sovereign risk on corporate spreads across different panel econometric specifications and bonds. Moreover, markets do not apply the ceiling rule in 77–90% of the bonds we sample and these findings are consistent with rating agencies’ policies toward the latter for about 50% of the firms. These results are robust to the inclusion of firm- and bond-specific variables derived from the structural approach to credit risk and to the business cycle in each country.     

Sovereign credit spreads

The paper develops a structural credit risk model to study sovereign credit risk and the dynamics of sovereign credit spreads. The model features endogenous default and recovery rates that both depend on the interaction between domestic output fluctuations and global macroeconomic conditions. We show that sovereigns choose to default at higher levels of economic output once global macroeconomic conditions are bad. This yields to default rates and credit spreads that are substantially higher compared to normal times. We derive closed-form expressions for sovereign debt values and default times and focus on the dynamics of sovereign credit spreads. As opposed to standard theories of sovereign debt, this paper’s structural model generates much richer default patterns and non-linearities through regime-shifts in the global macroeconomic environment. Moreover, changes in the global environment reveal the interconnectedness of the financial system.     

Trade Credit and Informational Asymmetry

Commonly used trade credit terms implicitly define a high interest rate that operates as an efficient screening device where information about buyer default risk is asymmetrically held. By offering trade credit, a seller can identify prospective defaults more quickly than if financial institutions were the sole providers of short-term financing. The information is valuable in cases where the seller has made nonsalvageable investments in buyers since it enables the seller to take actions to protect such investments.