What can EMU countries' sovereign bond spreads tell us about market perceptions of default probabilities during the recent financial crisis?

This paper presents a new approach for analysing the recent development of EMU sovereign bond spreads. Based on a GARCH-in-mean model originally used in the exchange rate target zone literature, spreads are decomposed into a risk premium, an expected loss component and a liquidity premium. Time-varying default probabilities are derived. The results suggest that the rise in sovereign spreads during the recent financial crisis mainly reflects an increased expected loss component. In addition, the rescue of Bear Stearns in March 2008 seems to mark a change in market perceptions of sovereign bond risk. The government bonds of some countries lost their former role as a safe haven. While price competitiveness always helps to explain sovereign spreads, it increasingly moved into investors' focus as financial sector soundness weakened. --Sovereign bond spread,GARCH-in-mean,default probability

Time-varying contributions by the corporate bond and CDS markets to credit risk price discovery

This paper looks at the dynamic price relationship between spreads in the corporate bond market and credit default swaps (CDS). It picks up where Blanco et al (2005) leave off but is focused on European credit markets. The study is based on companies listed in the iTraxx CDS index and thus on new data on a more liquid CDS market. Unlike previous studies, which look at price formation in a time-invariant context, the contributions of both markets to price discovery are analysed in a timevariant context. We devote particular attention to the question of whether such information input is stable in times of crisis and find that, although the CDS market slightly dominates the price discovery process, its contribution fell visibly during the turbulence on the credit markets in early 2005 in favour of that of the bond market. --price discovery,credit risk,corporate bonds,credit derivatives,Kalman filter