中国主权资产负债表及其风险评估(下)

2000——2010年,中国的国民资产负债表呈快速扩张之势。对外资产、基础设施以及房地产资产迅速积累,构成资产扩张的主导因素。这记载了出口导向发展战略之下中国工业化与城镇化加速发展的历史进程。在负债方,各级政府以及国有企业的负债以高于私人部门的增长率扩张。这凸显了政府主导经济活动的体制特征。对主权资产负债表的风险评估表明:(1)总体上,中国主权净值为正,因而,在相当一段时间内,发生主权债务危机的概率极低;(2)近期的风险点主要体现在房地产信贷与地方债务上,而中国的长期风险则更多集中在对外资产负债表、企业债务与社保欠账上。这些风险大都是或有负债风险,且与过去的发展方式密切相关;(3)主权债务动态的模拟进一步揭示出维持经济增长率与利率之差对于化解债务风险的重要性。因此,转变经济发展方式,保持经济可持续增长,是应对主权债务风险的根本途径。     

The sovereign spread in Asian emerging economies: The significance of external versus internal factors

This paper investigates the dynamic relations between external factors, domestic macroeconomic factors with sovereign spreads, debt to GDP ratio, etc. in Asian emerging countries. First, we develop a theoretical model that determines the equilibrium debt level, probability of default and sovereign spread and draw empirical implications. We then employ a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model to investigate empirically how the spread of sovereign debt is influenced over time by both external and domestic factors. The empirical results show that variations in sovereign spreads are mainly driven by external shocks, with the term structure of US interest rate and the global risk aversion having the most important role. The findings also indicate that shocks from the US have a direct effect on sovereign spread and an indirect effect via domestic macroeconomic fundamentals. Finally, the evidence produced validates the presence of some response patterns of sovereign spread to the external shocks.     

中国主权资产负债表及其风险评估(上)

本文基于国民资产负债表的理论框架,运用现有数据并通过必要的估算,初步编制了2000—2010年的中国主权资产负债表。结果显示,中国各年主权资产净额均为正值且呈上升趋势。这表明,中国政府拥有足够的主权资产来覆盖其主权负债。因此,在不短的时期内,中国发生主权债务危机的可能性极低。对总债务水平与全社会杠杆率(即总债务/GDP)的分析显示:中国的全社会杠杆率虽高于金砖国家,但远低于所有的发达经济体,总体上处在温和、可控的阶段。但是,近年来该杠杆率的提高速度很快,须引起关注。分部门的分析显示:企业负债率(占GDP比重)很高,构成中国资产负债表的显著特色。2010年,该负债率已逾100%,超过OECD国家90%的阈值,值得高度警惕。     

Effects of Eurobonds: A stochastic sovereign debt sustainability analysis for Portugal,Ireland and Greece

This paper assesses the impact of Eurobonds on sovereign debt dynamics for selected European member states (Greece, Ireland and Portugal). For each member state, we produce sovereign debt fan charts of (i) a baseline scenario (no Eurobonds) and (ii) a Full-Fledged Eurobond introduction. The key building blocks of our methodology are (i) a debt framework (which embeds the traditional recursive debt equation), (ii) a vector autoregressive model to take into account and parametrise macroeconomic uncertainty and (iii) a fiscal reaction function. Conditional on the absence of moral hazard, we find Eurobonds to be a good instrument to absorb macroeconomic shocks and to diminish uncertainty over future debt forecasts; for Ireland and Portugal, we find debt to be 20 percentage points lower than under our baseline scenario, by 2020.     

Sovereign Debt without Default Penalties

We develop a theory of sovereign borrowing where default penalties are not implementable. We show that when debt is held by both domestic and foreign agents, the median voter might have an interest in serving it. Our theory has important practical implications regarding (a) the role of financial intermediaries in sovereign lending, (b) the effect of capital flows on price volatility including the possible overvaluation of debt to the point that the median voter is priced out of the market, and (c) debt restructuring where creditors are highly dispersed.     

Financial stress and sovereign debt composition

Using a panel of 13 advanced economies for the period 1980–2012, we find that periods of impaired financial intermediation mainly accrue to maturity mismatches in sovereign debt. Thus, a higher (lower) share of short-term (medium and long-term) debt leads to an increase in the financial stress index. From a policy perspective, our work suggests that debt management policies translated into longer average maturities of sovereign debt not only reduce the expected debt servicing cost, but also mitigate strains in the financial sector.     

Sovereign debt, structural adjustment, and conditionality

The lack of a proper enforcement mechanism for sovereign debt generates a commitment failure. As a result, a sovereign may seek to improve its position in debt renegotiations and thus evade its debt obligations by reducing exports. Conditionality seeks to provide a solution to the incentive problem by addressing the commitment failure. Formalizing this argument, we show that conditionality helps the repayment of sovereign debt. In certain circumstances, it can eliminate debt overhang, especially when it is coupled with concessionary lending of sufficient magnitude. It is, however, unable to restore first best. When it is anticipated by lenders, conditionality may get international financial institutions and sovereign debtors into a trap where the debt overhang persist, debt rescheduling takes place periodically, and conditionality continues indefinitely.     

COALITION GOVERNMENTS AND SOVEREIGN DEBT CRISES

This article examines the domestic politics of sovereign debt crises. I focus on two alternative mechanisms that aggregate the preferences of domestic actors over debt repayment: single-party versus multiparty coalition governments. I uncover a very strong empirical regularity using cross-national data from 48 developing countries between 1971 and 1997. Countries that are governed by a coalition of parties are less likely to reschedule their debts than those under single-party governments. The effect of multiparty coalitions on sovereign defaults is quantitatively large and roughly of the same order of magnitude as liquidity factors such as debt burden and debt service. These results are robust to numerous specifications and samples.     

后金融危机时代国家主权债务危机的负面影响与反思

迪拜主权债务危机的出现,拉开了国家主权债务危机的序幕,此后不久希腊爆发的国家主权债务危机,更加深了世界对美国可能的国家主权债务危机的深深忧虑。迪拜债务危机的负面影响,造成了国家信用的下降,全球股市震荡,影响到国际银行业,延缓了世界经济复苏。为此,需警惕国际经济与政策对资产价格与房地产价格的冲击。经济增长不能脱离实体经济,经济建设需量力而行,外债规模需考虑自身的需要与可偿还能力,房地产市场的健康发展对经济的发展至关重要。迪拜债务危机对我国的警示应引起足够重视。     

Increase in home bias in the Eurozone debt crisis: The role of domestic shocks

One of the most striking consequences of the recent episode of sovereign debt market stress in the Eurozone has been the increase in the share of public debt held by the domestic sector in fragile economies. However, the causes and potential consequences of this increase were only given scarce attention in the literature on the Euro area sovereign debt crisis. In order to fill this gap, we first determine the shocks that impact the variation in the share of sovereign debt held at home in an SVAR model on a sample of Eurozone countries between 2002 and 2014, distinguishing between external and domestic shocks. Thanks to several alternative tests, we show that home bias in sovereign debt responds positively to country-specific fundamentals and expectation shocks but we find no evidence that the increase in home bias is destabilizing per se in the short-run. Second, a stylized theoretical model backed by the empirical results predicts that the consequences for sovereign debt crisis depend on the relative impact of domestic initial destabilizing shocks and increased home bias. The analysis suggests that an increase in home bias in times of sovereign debt stress, despite reflecting deteriorating fiscal conditions, may make default less likely.     

Evaluating sovereign risk spillovers on domestic banks during the European debt crisis

Using a Markov-switching model with time-varying probabilities, spillovers from sovereign to domestic bank CDS spreads during the European debt crisis for a set of 14 European countries and 30 European banks are investigated. Our model is able to capture how the increased sovereign risk observed between 2010 and 2013 throughout Europe has impacted i) the probability that banks fall into a crisis regime and ii) the probability that banks stay in the crisis regime. The latter state is characterized by a high volatility and large positive returns of CDS spreads. Different regime-dependent indicators have been computed to assess heterogeneity within the region. The evidence indicates that the intensification of sovereign risk observed during the European debt crisis has positively and significantly driven the regime shifts in volatility of the bank CDS spreads due to increased risk aversion. The results show that the increase in sovereign credit risk seems to have generated second-round effects for some banks that have experienced a deterioration in their funding conditions due to a rise in the domestic sovereign default risk. Overall, our results suggest that sovereign CDS spreads can be considered good forewarning indicators for predicting the evolution of bank CDS spreads. We also find that the effects differ depending on the country and the financial institution. This result suggests that banks are heterogeneously exposed to sovereign credit risk within the same country. One argument relates to the size of these financial institutions and the domestic exposure to sovereign debt.     

Fundamentals and Sovereign Risk of Emerging Markets

We empirically assess the relative importance of various economic fundamentals in accounting for the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads of emerging markets during 2004–2012, which encompasses the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Inflation, state fragility, external debt and commodity terms of trade volatility were positively associated, while trade openness and a more favourable fiscal balance/GDP ratio were negatively associated with sovereign CDS spreads. Yet the relative importance of economic fundamentals in the pricing of sovereign risk varies over time. The key factors are trade openness and state fragility in the pre‐crisis period, the external debt/GDP ratio and inflation in the crisis period, and inflation and the public debt/GDP ratio in the post‐crisis period. Asian countries enjoy lower sovereign spreads than Latin American countries, and this gap widened during and after the crisis. Trade openness was the biggest factor behind Asia's lower sovereign spreads before the crisis, and inflation during and after the crisis. The results imply that external factors were paramount in pricing sovereign risk prior to the crisis, but internal factors associated with the capacity to adjust to adverse shocks gained prominence during and after the crisis.     

European policy and markets: Did policy initiatives stem the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area?

We investigate how European policy initiatives influenced market assessments of sovereign default risk and banking sector fragility during the sovereign debt crisis in four adversely affected countries — Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy. We focus on three broad groups of policies: (a) ECB policy actions (monetary and financial support), (b) EU programs (financial and fiscal rules as well as financial support in crisis countries), and (c) domestic austerity programs. We measure immediate market impact effects: what policies changed risk perceptions, using CDS spreads on sovereign bonds and banks in this assessment. We employ dynamic panel and event study methodologies in the empirical work. We find that a number of programs initially stabilized sovereign and bank bond markets (e.g. Outright Monetary Transactions program), although announcement and implementation impacts on markets differed in some cases (e.g. second Covered Market Bond Program). Actions designed to shore up sovereign markets often lowered risk assessments in bank bond markets and policies designed to ensure safety and soundness of the European banking system in some cases significantly impacted sovereign debt markets. Finally, a number of policies designed to stabilize markets had surprisingly little immediate impact on either sovereign or bank bond market risk assessments.     

Sovereign bond market dependencies and crisis transmission around the eurozone debt crisis: a dynamic copula approach

We examine the dependency between the European government bond markets around the recent sovereign debt crisis. A dynamic copula approach is used to model the time-varying dependence structure of those government bond markets, evaluate the nature and strength of their dependencies over time, and gauge the transmission of the crisis shocks. Our results can be summarized as follows: i) the eurozone sovereign bond markets under consideration have a significant and positive dependence with the Greek and the EMU benchmark sovereign bond markets; ii) the dynamic-BB7 copula function best describes the dependence structure between these sovereign bond markets and provides evidence of asymmetric tail dependence; iii) the conditional probability of crisis transmission from Greece to other eurozone countries is higher than the other way around; and iv) Greece is the most vulnerable country when the eurozone entered into the sovereign debt crisis.     

Sudden Stops,Time Inconsistency,and the Duration of Sovereign Debt

We study the sovereign debt duration chosen by the government in the context of a standard model of sovereign default. The government balances off increasing the duration of its debt to mitigate rollover risk and lowering duration to mitigate the debt dilution problem. We present two main results. First, when the government decides the debt duration on a sequential basis, sudden stop risk increases the average duration by 1 year. Second, we illustrate the time inconsistency problem in the choice of sovereign debt duration: governments would like to commit to a duration that is 1.7 years shorter than the one they choose when decisions are made sequentially.     

Does local and Euro area sentiment matter for sovereign debt markets? Evidence from a bailout country

Does sentiment impact the sovereign debt markets? This article investigates whether lagged domestic and Euro area irrational sentiment (optimism or pessimism unwarranted by fundamentals) predicts future sovereign bond spreads, in Portugal, between January 2000 and December 2013. We find that domestic and Euro area sentiment negatively forecasts total return spreads and that this effect is stronger during the bailout period. Also, we find that the business sentiment is even most noticed. Therefore, Portuguese sovereign debt market is prone to the influence of investors’ sentiment.     

关于解决主权债重组问题的讨论:基于博弈均衡的分析框架

集中于国际主权债重组的理论诠释,并通过对主权债重组中的两个问题--集体行动困境和道德风险的博弈模型建立和分析,讨论如何建立一个解决主权债务重组问题的机制,使遇到债务困难的国家和债权人循此机制解决问题从而减少债权债务双方的损失,总结出处理主权债务问题应特别考虑的几个关系,提出一些启发性的政策建议.     

欧元区主权债务期限结构的实证分析

本文通过对欧元区成员国长期债务占总债务比重与各国整体宏观经济指标相关关系的实证分析表明,欧元区各国以GDP与税收比、债务与GDP之比所描述的当期融资能力与长期债务比例呈显著负相关,由于非对称冲击的作用,各国体现出不同的特征。本文同时构建了一个政府债务效用函数的二期模型,说明主权债务期限结构安排可以通过宏观调控进行跨期平滑,以防止主权债务危机的发生。     

TIME‐VARYING VOLATILITY,DEFAULT, AND THE SOVEREIGN RISK PREMIUM

This article studies how volatility changes affect sovereign spreads in strategic default models. Volatility changes affect savings and sovereign spreads. However, the impact of volatility shocks is state dependent; when the economy has a low debt, an increase in volatility is prone to generate precautionary savings. Instead, with high debt, an increase in volatility is likely to induce an even further increase in debt and spreads, both in endowment and production economies. I document a positive correlation between sovereign spreads and aggregate income volatility for a set of European economies during the debt crisis, consistent with the model's implications.     

Determinants of the distance between sovereign credit ratings and sub-sovereign bond ratings: Evidence from emerging markets and developing economies

This article explores factors that affect the distance between sovereign credit ratings and the ratings assigned to new foreign-currency bonds issued by sub-sovereign entities (such as private non-financial corporations, financial firms, and public sector enterprises) in 47 emerging markets and developing economies. Censored and double-hurdle regression models are used to estimate the relative contributions of bond-level, issuer-level, and macroeconomic factors that determine this distance, separately for those rated at or below the sovereign rating and those rated above. For the three quarters or more of sub-sovereign bond ratings that are constrained by the sovereign rating ceiling, a Tobit regression model shows a smaller distance – suggesting stronger sovereign–corporate linkages – for public sector enterprises and financial firms relative to other firms. Riskier global financial conditions are also associated with sub-sovereign bonds being rated closer to the sovereign rating. For the small number of sub-sovereign bonds rated higher than the sovereign rating, a double-hurdle model shows that certain debt features – such as bonds backed by future-flow receivables or other collateral or structured as Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) – significantly raise the likelihood of piercing the sovereign rating ceiling and also increase the distance above the sovereign ceiling.