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The high level of economic uncertainty linked to the pace of the recovery process can persist after a crisis and has implications for the market pricing of firms’ credit risk reflected in credit default swap (CDS) spreads. This paper examines the role of key proxies for the economic state and its real-time uncertainty in determining Northern American CDX index spreads. Focusing on the recovery period following the 2007–2009 global financial crisis, we find that measures of economic output, employment, inflation, and economic uncertainty, all significantly influence CDX spreads, beyond the impact of conventional determinants. Furthermore, our results provide evidence that the sensitivity of investment-grade and high-yield CDX differs across economic aspects. Moreover, our out-of-sample predictive analysis identifies indicators and uncertainty measures with significant predictive content for quarter-ahead CDX spreads. Taken together, our findings indicate that academic modelers and practitioners employing more accurate representations of the macroeconomy in CDS modeling and analysis can improve upon the models that rely solely on the typically employed economic output variables or on broad data aggregation.

How much capital should financial intermediaries hold? We propose a general equilibrium model with a financial sector that makes risky long-term loans to firms, funded by deposits from savers. Government guarantees create a role for bank capital regulation. The model captures the sharp and persistent drop in macro-economic aggregates and credit provision as well as the sharp change in credit spreads observed during financial crises. Policies requiring intermediaries to hold more capital reduce financial fragility, reduce the size of the financial and non-financial sectors, and lower intermediary profits. They redistribute wealth from savers to the owners of banks and non-financial firms. Pre-crisis capital requirements are close to optimal. Counter-cyclical capital requirements increase welfare.

This paper explores the economic role credit rating agencies play in the corporate bond market. We consider three existing theories about multiple ratings: information production, rating shopping, and regulatory certification. Using differences in rating composition, default prediction, and credit spread changes, our evidence only supports regulatory certification. Marginal, additional credit ratings are more likely to occur because of, and seem to matter primarily for, regulatory purposes. They do not seem to provide significant additional information related to credit quality.

We examine whether bank credit-spread curves, engendered by subordinated debt, would help predict bank risk. We extract credit-spread curves for each bank each quarter and analyze the predictive properties of credit-spread slopes. We find that credit-spread slopes are significant predictors of future credit spreads. We also find that credit-spread slopes provide significant additional information on future bank risk variables, over and above other bank-specific and market-wide information.

This paper analyzes how U.S. monetary policy affects the pricing of dollar-denominated sovereign debt. We document that yields on dollardenominated 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-toone 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.

Loan screening and monitoring are critical to loan performance, but incentives are diminished for securitized loans. Risk retention is intended to harmonize the interests of originators and investors; however, it is unclear to what extent investors anticipate and respond to originators’ screening and monitoring incentives, particularly with respect to different types of risk retention. The theoretical literature suggests that equity retention is optimal in terms of screening efforts; thus, if investors anticipate these incentives, equity retention should lead to low credit spreads. Employing OLS and instrumental variables regressions, we empirically examine the effect of retention on spreads. Our analysis, based on a unique dataset of securitizations, reveals that the effects highly depend on the considered investment type. Credit spreads decrease by approx. 26 to 39 bps if the originator retains a material fraction of at least 5% of the deal’s nominal value. For tranches with high information sensitivity—where screening and monitoring incentives are most critical—investors, though, impose an additional risk premium of 120 basis points when originators fail to retain a substantial portion of the securitizations. In addition, we find that transactions with vertical slice retention are associated with a notably higher risk premium than those with equity retention, demonstrating the differential impact of retention structures on investor perceptions. Overall, our results underline that the extent of asymmetric information, particularly with respect to different types of investments and risk retention, is an important component in the pricing of securitizations.

Using a large sample of business groups from more than 100 countries around the world, we show that group information matters for parent and subsidiary default prediction. Group firms may support each other when in financial distress. Potential group support represents an off-balance sheet asset for the receiving firm and an off-balance sheet liability for the firm offering support. We find that subsidiary information improves parent default prediction over and above group-level consolidated information possibly because intragroup exposures are netted out upon consolidation. Moreover, we document that improvements in parent default prediction decrease in the extent of parent-country financial reporting transparency, a finding that suggests that within-group information matters most when consolidated financial statements are expected to be of lower quality. We also show that parent and other group-firms’ default risk exhibits predictive power for subsidiary default. Lastly, we find that within-group information explains cross-sectional variation in CDS spreads. Taken together, our findings contribute to the prior literature on default prediction and have direct relevance to investors, credit-rating agencies, and accounting regulators. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.

We present a model of the relationship between real interest rates, credit spreads, and the structure and risk of the banking system. Banks intermediate between entrepreneurs and investors, and can monitor entrepreneurs' projects. We characterize the equilibrium for a fixed aggregate supply of savings, showing that safer entrepreneurs will be funded by nonmonitoring banks and riskier entrepreneurs by monitoring banks. We show that an increase in savings reduces interest rates and spreads, and increases the relative size of the nonmonitoring banking system and the probability of failure of monitoring banks. We also show that the dynamic version of the model exhibits endogenous boom and bust cycles, and rationalizes the existence of countercyclical risk premia and the connection between low interest rates, tight credit spreads, and the buildup of risks during booms.

Many of the existing theoretical and empirical studies ignore the two-way relationship between a sovereign’s credit risk and economy. To address this gap, we develop a theoretical model that incorporates the feedback effects of sovereign-debt credit risk on a country’s economy and then provide empirical implications. The model links the risks of sovereign debt and economic fundamentals through a two-way transmission mechanism. In doing so, it demonstrates how economic-fundamentals-driven sovereign-debt credit risk can have a significant impact on economic fundamentals through a feedback effect that has the potential to significantly raise the sensitivity of a country’s economic performance to shocks from both the credit risk associated with sovereign debt and economic fundamentals. The outcomes of the theoretical model are then verified by empirically testing the feedback effects using a structural equation model (SEM) framework on data covering sovereign debt defaults worldwide. We demonstrate how disregarding feedback effects may result in information that is insufficient and less helpful to public-debt-management policymakers.

While the production of credit ratings has long been limited mainly to rating agencies (CRAs), recent years have seen the growing popularity of consensus credit ratings crowdsourced from banks (i.e., bank ratings). We provide the first comprehensive examination of the properties and informativeness of bank ratings relative to CRA ratings. We find that bank ratings often deviate from CRA ratings, with over 60% of firm-months having different bank and CRA ratings. These deviations contain useful information. Bank ratings improve out-of-sample prediction of defaults and CRA rating revisions and explain the cross-section of credit spreads. However, bank ratings do not improve out-of-sample prediction of credit excess returns, indicating that current prices incorporate bank rating information. Overall our findings suggest that bank ratings are a useful supplement to traditional credit ratings.