Three essays in asset pricing of sovereign fixed income instruments

Abstract

Non-default Component of Sovereign Emerging Market Yield Spreads and its Determinants: Evidence from Credit Default Swap Market. In this paper, I show that a sizable component of emerging market sovereign yield spreads is due to factors other than default risk such as liquidity. I estimate the non-default component of the yield spreads as the basis between the actual credit default swap (CDS) premium and the hypothetical CDS premium implied by emerging market bond yields. On average, the basis is large and positive for speculative grade bonds and slightly negative for investment grade bonds. Large positive basis for speculative grade bonds support the existence of speculation in the CDS market when the underling’s credit quality is bad. I study the effects of bond liquidity, liquidity in the CDS market, equity market performance and macroeconomic variables on the non-default component of the emerging market yield spreads. I show that bond liquidity has a significant and positive effect on the CDS-bond basis of investment grade bonds. The results suggest that the liquid bonds of investment grade bonds are more expensive relative to the prices implied their CDS premiums. However, the results are somewhat mixed and even contrary for the speculative grade bond sample.Emerging Market Local Currency Bond Market, Too Risky to Invest? Over the last decade, local currency emerging market (EM) debt has been developing to become an attractive and complementary investment category as many EM countries have been successful to reduce currency mismatches and maturity problems by implementing sound fiscal and monetary policies. Analyzing the period from 2002 to July 2009, we show that the local currency EM debt investments provide significant additional alpha and diversification to traditional bond portfolios. In particular, first, EM local currency bond returns are less correlated to the US stock market, treasury and high-yield bond markets, and global risk premia compared to the a case of EM equity and US dollar-denominated bond markets. Second, yields and excess returns on local currency debt depend largely on expected depreciation of the exchange rate against US dollar, while excess returns on dollar-denominated EM debt are for the most part compensation for bearing the global risk. Third, EM sovereign local currency bond returns beat other emerging and mature market asset classes by providing higher risk adjusted excess returns and diversification. In light of our findings, we suggest that the development of local currency bond markets in EM countries could contribute to global financial stability by reducing currency mismatches and reliance on foreign currency debt, which in turn is linked to growth and poverty reduction.Dynamic Sources of Sovereign Bond Market Liquidity. Using 482 US Dollar and Euro denominated bonds issued by 72 sovereigns, we examine the dynamic sources of time-series and cross-sectional variations in \textit{market-wide liquidity} of sovereign bonds as a novelty in the sovereign fixed income literature. Vector autoregression analysis shows that macroeconomic fundamentals and the financial market variables play a substantial role in the movements of aggregate liquidity throughout the whole sample period (1999-2010), although their effects are stronger during the financial crisis. Specifically, US industrial production growth rate and inflation rate have significant informative powers on the sovereign bond market liquidity. An increasing shock to the TED spread (the spread between 3-Month Libor and US T-bill), a measure of distrust in the banking system, has detrimental impact, while on the other side equity market performance is positively linked to market-wide bond liquidity. Furthermore, the direction of causality from the world financial and macroeconomic variables towards the aggregate bond market liquidity is confirmed by Granger causality tests. Finally, impulse response functions show that these relationships are persistent up to one-year forecast horizon