Do banks propagate debt market shocks?

Over the years, U.S. banks have increasingly relied on the bond market to finance their business. This created the potential for a link between the bond market and the corporate sector whereby borrowers, including those that do not rely on bond funding, became exposed to the conditions in the bond market. We investigate the importance of this link. Our results show that when the cost to access the bond market goes up, banks that rely on bond financing charge higher interest rates on their loans. Banks that rely exclusively on deposit funding follow bond financing banks and increase the interest rates on their loans, though by smaller amounts. Further, banks pass the bond market shocks predominantly to their risky borrowers that have access to the bond market and to their borrowers that do not have access to the bond market. These results show that banks propagate shocks to the bond market by passing them through their loan policies to their borrowers, including those that do not use bond financing.Banks and banking ; Banks and banking - Costs ; Bond market

Bond market mania

Bond market

What promotes greater use of the corporate bond market? A study of the issuance behaviour of firms in Asia

This paper investigates bond market development in Asia by exploring the determinants of firms' decisions to issue public debt in a range of Asian economies. Using a novel database covering the period 1995 to 2007, we use comparable micro level panel of nine countries - China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand - to explore factors that promote bond issuance by firms. We control for firm characteristics and market features such as bond market depth and liquidity; we also consider supra-national policy initiatives to improve bond market function. Our paper demonstrates that regional initiatives have been an important step towards greater bond issuance by firms in Asia, mostly by fostering market deepening and improving liquidity

Stock-bond co-movements and cross-country linkages

This paper shows empirically that the level of stock-bond correlation depends more on crosscountry influences than on stock and bond market interaction. The study examines the relation of cross-country and cross-asset stock and bond market linkages for eight developed countries and finds that (i) stock market returns primarily depend on the US stock market and (ii) bond market returns primarily depend on the US bond market. Recursive Granger causality tests further show that the dominance of the US stock and bond market has increased in recent years and that there is both Granger causality from stocks to bonds and from bonds to stocks in several periods. We argue that the relatively low level of stock-bond correlations is due to an increased cross-country interdependence of financial markets leading to more frequent portfolio reallocations between stocks and bonds in order to compensate for lower cross-country diversification benefits.financial market integration, stock market co-movements, bond market co-movements, stock-bond linkages, flight-to-quality, contagion

India's Bond Market-Developments and Challenges Ahead

While India boasts a world-class equity market and increasingly important bank assets, its bond market has not kept up. The government bond market remains illiquid. The corporate bond market, in addition, remains restrictive to participants and largely arbitrage-driven. Securitization, which once had the jump on other Asian markets, has failed to take off. To meet the needs of its firms and investors, the bond market must therefore evolve. This will mean creating new market sectors such as exchange-traded interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives contracts. It will mean relaxing exchange restrictions, easing investment mandates on contractual savings institutions, reforming the stamp duty tax, and revamping disclosure requirements for corporate public offers. This paper reviews the development and outlook of the Indian bond market. It looks at the market participants-including life insurance, pension funds, mutual funds and foreign investors-and it discusses the importance to development of learning from the innovations and experiences of others.India; emerging East Asia; bond market; securitization; collateralized borrowing and lending obligations (CBLO)

Bond market in turmoil

Monetary policy - United States ; Interest rates ; Bonds ; Rate of return

Sovereign Risk Premiums in the European Government Bond Market

This paper provides a study of bond yield differentials among EU government bonds issued between 1993 and 2005 on the basis of a unique dataset of issue spreads in the US and DM (Euro) bond market. Interest differentials between bonds issued by EU countries and Germany or the USA contain risk premiums which increase with fiscal imbalances and depend negatively on the issuer's relative bond market size. The start of the European Monetary Union has shifted market attention to debt service payments as the key measure of indebtedness and eliminated liquidity premiums in the euro area