Corporate bond prices and idiosyncratic risk: evidence from Australia

In this paper we investigate the bond price effect upon the information arrival of firm-specific idiosyncratic risk. We consider idiosyncratic dispersion and idiosyncratic volatility that capture, respectively, the direction of information and the magnitude of idiosyncratic risk. We find that idiosyncratic volatility does not affect bond prices, while the direction of idiosyncratic risk which reflects the favorable or unfavorable information exhibits impacts on bond prices. Idiosyncratic dispersion in the stock return of a firm in the preceding week, in general, is positively associated with bond price changes in the current week. This effect is most pronounced for firms exhibiting characteristics associated with lower default risk

Derivatives and Credit Contagion in Interconnected Networks

The importance of adequately modeling credit risk has once again been highlighted in the recent financial crisis. Defaults tend to cluster around times of economic stress due to poor macro-economic conditions, {\em but also} by directly triggering each other through contagion. Although credit default swaps have radically altered the dynamics of contagion for more than a decade, models quantifying their impact on systemic risk are still missing. Here, we examine contagion through credit default swaps in a stylized economic network of corporates and financial institutions. We analyse such a system using a stochastic setting, which allows us to exploit limit theorems to exactly solve the contagion dynamics for the entire system. Our analysis shows that, by creating additional contagion channels, CDS can actually lead to greater instability of the entire network in times of economic stress. This is particularly pronounced when CDS are used by banks to expand their loan books (arguing that CDS would offload the additional risks from their balance sheets). Thus, even with complete hedging through CDS, a significant loan book expansion can lead to considerably enhanced probabilities for the occurrence of very large losses and very high default rates in the system. Our approach adds a new dimension to research on credit contagion, and could feed into a rational underpinning of an improved regulatory framework for credit derivatives.Comment: 26 pages, 7 multi-part figure