electric power sector reform liberalization models and electric power prices in developing countries an empirical analysis using international panel data this study aims to clarify whether the effects of electric power sector reforms should be different either across regions or between developing and developed countries an empirical model was analyzed to observe the impact of electric power prices on the selection of a liberalization model in the power sector this was achieved by the use of an ordered response fixed effect and a random effect model an instrument variable technique was also used to estimate the impact of the liberalization model on the electric power price this technique addressed the problems of simultaneity bias between the electric power price and the liberalization models selected these econometric models were designed using panel data from 78 countries in four regions developed countries asian developing countries the former soviet union and eastern europe and latin america for the period from 1985 to 2003 the research findings suggest that higher electricity prices are one of the driving forces for governments to adopt liberalization models however the development of liberalization models in the power sector does not necessarily reduce electricity prices in fact contrary to expectations there was a tendency for the price to rise in every market modeled

sovereign ratings and their asymmetric response to fundamentals abstract the evolution of sovereign ratings is strongly asymmetric as downgrades tend to be deeper and faster than upgrades in other words once a country loses its initial status it takes a long time to recover it using s p data we characterize rating cycles in terms of their duration and amplitude then we study whether the reaction of this agency to new domestic economic and financial information is also different during upgrade and downgrade phases our results indicate that favorable fundamentals could be helpful in terms of smoothing and slowing down rating downgrades whereas they do not seem to accelerate rating upgrades

modeling correlated market and credit risk in fixed income portfolios abstract current risk assessment methodologies separate the analysis of market and credit risk and thus misestimate security and portfolio risk levels we propose a new approach that relates financial market volatility to firm specific credit risk and integrates interest rate interest rate spread and foreign exchange rate risk into one overall fixed income portfolio risk assessment accounting for the correlation between these significant risk factors as well as portfolio diversification results in improved risk measurement and management the methodology is shown to produce reasonable credit transition probabilities prices for bonds with credit risk and portfolio value at risk measures

credit risk drivers evaluating the contribution of firm level information and of macroeconomic dynamics abstract understanding if credit risk is driven mostly by idiosyncratic firm characteristics or by systematic factors is an important issue for the assessment of financial stability by exploring the links between credit risk and macroeconomic developments we observe that in periods of economic growth there may be some tendency towards excessive risk taking using an extensive dataset with detailed information for more than 30 000 firms we show that default probabilities are influenced by several firm specific characteristics when time effect controls or macroeconomic variables are also taken into account the results improve substantially hence though the firms financial situation has a central role in explaining default probabilities macroeconomic conditions are also very important when assessing default probabilities over time

policy implications of the federal reserve study of credit risk models at major us banking institutions abstract the current regulatory capital standard for banks the basle accord is a lose lose proposition regulators cannot conclude that a bank with a nominally high regulatory capital ratio has a correspondingly low probability of insolvency on the other hand because the accord often levies a capital charge out of proportion to the true economic risk of a position banks must engage in regulatory capital arbitrage or exit their low risk business lines since such arbitrage is costly the capital regulations keep banks from maximizing the value of the financial firm regulators need to answer three questions 1 what are the goals of prudential regulation and supervision 2 how should bank soundness be defined and quantified 3 at what level should a minimum soundness standard be set in order to meet the perhaps conflicting goals of prudential regulation and supervision possible answers to these questions are attempted then the paper analyzes the two leading proposals for rationalizing the accord a modified basle or ratings based approach and a full models approach

regional pay the public private sector pay differential abstractregional pay the public private sector pay differential regional studies this paper extends the debate on making public sector wages more responsive to those in the private sector the way in which the public private sector wage differential is calculated dramatically alters conclusions and far from there being substantial regional disparity in wages offered to public sector workers any differences are predominantly concentrated in london and the south east where public sector workers are significantly disadvantaged relative to private sector workers this has implications for staff recruitment and retention such findings question the need for regional market facing pay but highlight the necessity to revisit the london weighting offered to public sector workers

just another expensive talking shop public attitudes and the 2004 regional assembly referendum in the north east of england rallings c and thrasher m 2006 just another expensive talking shop public attitudes and the 2004 regional assembly referendum in the north east of england regional studies 40 927 936 electors in the north east of england voted overwhelmingly in november 2004 against the establishment of an elected regional assembly all parts of the region every type of elector and supporters of all major political parties were opposed to the new institution although most people thought the region was disadvantaged compared with other parts of great britain few believed an assembly would have a positive impact on this or any other public concern supporters of the assembly were additionally handicapped by the perception that their campaign was less effective than that mounted by the no side the results of the referendum and the accompanying attitudes have removed elected regional assemblies from the policy agenda for the foreseeable future rallings c et thrasher m 2006 tout simplement c est un li

the term structure of credit spreads with jump risk abstract default risk analysis is important for valuing corporate bonds swaps and credit derivatives and plays a critical role in managing the credit risk of bank loan portfolios this paper offers a theory to explain the observed empirical regularities on default probabilities recovery rates and credit spreads it incorporates jump risk into the default process with the jump risk a firm can default instantaneously because of a sudden drop in its value as a result a credit model with the jump risk is able to match the size of credit spreads on corporate bonds and can generate various shapes of yield spread curves and marginal default rate curves including upward sloping downward sloping flat and hump shaped even if the firm is currently in a good financial standing the model also links recovery rates to the firm value at default so that the variation in recovery rates is endogenously generated and the correlation between recovery rates and credit ratings before default reported in altman j finance 44 1989 909 can be justified

reinforcement learning in the el farol model abstract the paper applies the approach of reinforcement learning to arthur s american economic review 84 1994a 406 el farol problem where repeatedly a population of agents decides to go to a bar or stay home and going is enjoyable if and only if the bar is not crowded the numerical simulations show that the learning process is fairly efficient in that attendances tend to fluctuate around the bar s capacity on the other hand the shape of the long run equilibrium frequency distribution is usually quite distinct from the nash equilibrium solutions and furthermore rather sensitive to some of the model s specification details

political decentralization economic growth and regional disparities in the oecd ezcurra r and rodriguez pose a political decentralization economic growth and regional disparities in the oecd regional studies recent scholarly work has addressed whether decentralization affects economic growth and regional disparities by typically resorting to fiscal decentralization while disregarding political decentralization indices this article covers this gap by investigating the association between different political decentralization indices with two measures of economic performance changes in gross domestic product gdp per capita and in territorial inequalities the results suggest a lack of statistical relationship between political decentralization and economic growth regardless of how political decentralization is measured in the case of regional disparities the results depend on the index used and range from the absence of a link to a positive association between both factors ezcurra r and rodriguez pose a oecd

a neoclassical interpretation of momentum abstract the neoclassical theory of investment implies that expected stock returns are tied with the expected marginal benefit of investment divided by the marginal cost of investment winners have higher expected growth and expected marginal productivity two major components of the marginal benefit of investment and earn higher expected stock returns than losers the investment model succeeds in capturing average momentum profits reversal of momentum in long horizons long run risks in momentum and the interaction of momentum with several firm characteristics however the model fails to reproduce the procyclicality of momentum as well as its negative interaction with book to market equity

credit portfolios what defines risk horizons and risk measurement abstract the strong autocorrelation between economic cycles demands that we analyze credit portfolio risk in a multiperiod setup we embed a standard one factor model in such a setup we discuss the calibration of the model to standard poor s ratings data in detail but because single period risk measures cannot capture the cumulative effects of systematic shocks over several periods we define an alternative risk measure which we call the time conditional expected shortfall tes to quantify credit portfolio risk over a multiperiod horizon

analyzing the impact of credit migration in a portfolio setting abstract credit migration is an essential component of credit portfolio modeling in this paper we outline a framework for gauging the effects of credit migration on portfolio risk measurements for a typical loan portfolio we find credit migration can explain as much as 51 of volatility and 35 of economic capital we compare through the cycle migration effects implied by agency rating transitions with point in time migration implied by edf expected default frequency transitions and find that migration of point in time credit quality accounts for a greater fraction of total portfolio risk when compared with through the cycle dynamics in a stylized analytic setting we show that when controlling for pd term structure effects higher likelihood of moving away from the current credit state does not necessarily imply greater risk finally we review methods for generating high frequency transition matrices needed for analyzing instruments with cash flows or contingencies whose frequencies are asynchronous to an available transition matrix we further demonstrate that the naive application of such methods can result in material deviations to portfolio analytics

measurement estimation and comparison of credit migration matrices abstract credit migration matrices are cardinal inputs to many risk management applications their accurate estimation is therefore critical we explore two approaches cohort and two variants of duration one imposing the other relaxing time homogeneity and the resulting differences both statistically through matrix norms and economically using a credit portfolio model we propose a new metric for comparing these matrices based on singular values and apply it to credit rating histories of s p rated us firms from 1981 2002 we show that the migration matrices have been increasing in size since the mid 1990s with 2002 being the largest in the sense of being the most dynamic we develop a testing procedure using bootstrap techniques to assess statistically the differences between migration matrices as represented by our metric we demonstrate that it can matter substantially which estimation method is chosen economic credit risk capital differences implied by different estimation techniques can be as large as differences between economic regimes recession vs expansion ignoring the efficiency gain inherent in the duration methods by using the cohort method instead is more damaging than imposing a possibly false assumption of time homogeneity

an experiment to evaluate bayesian learning of nash equilibrium play abstract we report on an experiment designed to evaluate the empirical implications of jordan s model of bayesian learning in games of incomplete information a finite example is constructed in which the model generates unique predictions of subjects choices in nearly all periods when the true game defined by players private information was one with a unique equilibrium in pure strategies the experimental subjects play converged to the equilibrium as jordan s theory predicts even when the subjects had not attained complete information about one another but when there were two pure strategy equilibria the theory s predictions were not consistent with observed behavior journal of economic literature classification numbers d83 c72 c92

modelling of insurers rating determinants an application of machine learning techniques and statistical models abstract in recent years financial regulations such as basel ii and solvency ii have highlighted the utility of credit risk assessments through internal rating systems particularly for estimating the probability of default pd of credit exposures financial entities must provide clear definitions of their internal ratings thus it is possible to associate internal grades to some external rating scale and then to attribute the external pd to the internal grades however this mapping must be based on an extensive comparison of both internal and external rating criteria a substantial body of research has been undertaken of rating determinants for banks and large industrial corporations however the academic literature on insurers rating determinants is very limited and fitness measures have not traditionally been provided this paper proposes a three step model to analyse rating determinants and it is applied to a sample of european insurance firms firstly a feature selection process is performed that mixes statistical bayesian and machine learning approaches from selected features several multivariate models are run both in the statistical field mda logit models and the decision trees research area c4 5 cart their accuracies are compared through bootstrapping strategies and a final model is proposed results show that the feature selection process selects a small group of relevant attributes regarding multivariate models the cart gini oblique decision tree appears to be a good strategy providing a quite satisfactory equilibrium between precision and comprehensibility

a learning curve of the market chasing alpha of socially responsible firms abstract this paper explores stock market reactions to corporate social performance we construct a value weighted portfolio based on the list of 100 best csr companies in the world published on the forbes website by reputation institute this portfolio yields statistically significant annual abnormal returns of 1 81 and 1 26 by controlling for carhart four factors and fama french five factors respectively 2 41 and 1 84 respectively for an equal weighted portfolio moreover such abnormal returns decrease as time passes especially after the inaugural publication of the csr lists in 2013 furthermore we find that companies with better social performance are more likely to have positive earnings surprises and that their returns are more sensitive to earnings surprises the results have three implications firstly csr reputation contributes positively to a firm s short term superior equity performance secondly the csr lists facilitate market correction of mispricing intangibles such as csr reputation abnormal returns decrease as the market gradually learns about the value of firms social performance lastly the paper contributes to the socially responsible investing sri screens and provides guidance for investors who would like to do well financially by doing good socially

liquidity credit quality and the relation between volatility and trading activity evidence from the corporate bond market this paper investigates the roles of illiquidity and credit risk in determining the relations between price volatility of a bond and its trading frequency and trade size based on a large transaction dataset from october 2004 to june 2012 we find a positive relation between volatility and trading frequency and a negative relation between volatility and trade size consistent with the prediction of the search based theory the relations are much stronger for illiquid and risky bonds furthermore both liquidity and credit risk become more important in times of stress and their effects are reinforcing results strongly suggest that search frictions and credit risk are important factors driving the relation between volatility and trading activity in the corporate bond market

interest rates and credit risk this paper explores the effects of shifts in interest rates on corporate leverage and default we develop a dynamic model in which the relationship between firms and their outside financiers is affected by a moral hazard problem and entrepreneurs initial wealth is scarce the link between leverage and default risk comes from the lower incentives of overindebted entrepreneurs to guarantee firm survival the need to finance new investment with outside funding pushes firms leverage ratio above some state contingent target towards which they gradually adjust through earnings retention the dynamic response of leverage and default to interest rate rises and cuts is both asymmetric and heterogeneously distributed across firms both rises and cuts increase the aggregate default rate in the short run however a higher interest rate reduces firms target leverage and hence produces lower default rates in the longer run this helps rationalize some evidence regarding the risk taking channel of monetary policy

the implications of corporate bond ratings drift examination of the ratings of over 7000 bonds issued in the 1970 88 period reveals that some 40 to 80 of bonds initially rated bb and above can be expected to experience at least one rating change in the 1 0 years following issuance a rated bonds appear to be more stable than aaarated bonds bb rated bonds the highest junk bond category are the least stable furthermore bonds initially rated a and above have a greater tendency to be downgraded than to be upgraded among the investment grades only bonds initially rated bbb tend to be upgraded more than they are downgraded as for bonds originally rated non investment grade junk there does not appear to be a tendency toward either upgrades or downgrades in the sample period

moody s and s p ratings are they equivalent conservative ratings and split rated bond yields we examine the relative impact of moody s and s p ratings on bond yields and find that at issuance yields on split rated bonds with superior moody s ratings are about 8 basis points lower than yields on split rated bonds with superior s p ratings this suggests that investors differentiate between the two ratings and assign more weight to the ratings from moody s the more conservative rating agency moody s becomes more conservative after 1998 and the impact of a superior moody s rating becomes stronger furthermore the differential impact of the two ratings is more pronounced for the more opaque rule 144a issues

the underpinnings of country risk assessment abstract this paper surveys the history and current status of country risk assessment the motivation is to understand why it is that country risk assessors have such a poor track record in anticipating the onset of financial crises the development of the field reflects changes in the composition of international capital flows these changes have confounded a definition of country risk especially if a definition is centered on a particular event it is then argued that the field has reached an impasse and this impasse is related to the methods of abstraction and the current crisis of vision within the science of economics this crisis of vision as it pertains to theories of financial crises has led to increased reliance on quantitative methods in the field of country risk the paper concludes by proposing a new direction for the field the first step towards which is to recognize that the object of country risk assessment is not to monitor for a particular event or symptom of financial crisis but rather to monitor for a particular state of the economy

risk perception and the financial system i examine how a country s financial system influences assessments of firm level risk consistent with theories of financial intermediation i find that firms located in a country with a bank oriented financial system are perceived as posing a lower credit risk and correspondingly are assigned higher credit ratings than otherwise similar firms in a market oriented setting even after considering elements of a country s legal infrastructure that relate to creditor protection and insolvency proceedings the financial system remains an important determinant of credit rating assignment the results are robust to the inclusion of several firm level controls including financial performance industry ownership concentration political connections and the ease with which the firm s assets can be monitored

forecasting and decomposition of portfolio credit risk using macroeconomic and frailty factors this paper presents a dynamic portfolio credit model following the regulatory framework using macroeconomic and latent risk factors to predict the aggregate loan portfolio loss in a banking system the latent risk factors have three levels global across the entire banking system parent sectoral for the intermediate loan sectors and sector specific for the individual loan sectors the aggregate credit loss distribution of the banking system over a risk horizon is generated by monte carlo simulation and a quantile estimator is used to produce the aggregate risk measure and economic capital the risk contributions of the individual sectors and risk factors are measured by combining the hoeffding decomposition with the euler capital allocation rule for the u s banking system we find that the real gdp growth rate the global and sector wide frailty risk factors and their spillovers significantly affect loan defaults and the impacts of the frailty factors are not only economy wide but also sector specific we also find that the frailty risk factors make more significant risk contributions to the aggregate portfolio risk than the macroeconomic factors while the macroeconomic factors help to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the credit risk forecasts

the impact of diverse measures of default risk on uk stock returns a number of recent papers examine the relationship between default risk and equity returns and the results are mixed these studies employ different measures of default risk and we find that correlations between eight diverse measures of default risk tend to be less than 50 nonetheless we find that the relationship between stock returns and diverse measures of default risk tends to be consistent default risk is a significant determinant of stock returns and this relationship is hump backed as predicted by garlappi and yan 2011

bank capital requirements business cycle fluctuations and the basel accords a synthesis abstract in order to survey the mechanisms through which the introduction of basel ii bank capital requirements is likely to accentuate the procyclical tendencies of banking this paper brings together the theoretical literature on the bank capital channel of propagation of exogenous shocks and the literature on the regulatory framework of capital requirements under the basel accords we conclude that the theoretical models that revisit the bank capital channel under the new accord generally support the basel ii procyclicality hypothesis and that the magnitude of the procyclical effects essentially depends on i the composition of banks asset portfolios ii the approach adopted by banks to compute their minimum capital requirements iii the nature of the rating system used by banks iv the view adopted concerning how credit risk evolves through time v the capital buffers over the regulatory minimum held by the banking institutions vi the improvements in credit risk management and vii the supervisor and market intervention under basel ii the recent events and instability in financial markets all over the world have led the procyclicality issue to enter the agendas of several political international fora and some measures to mitigate procyclicality are being put forward the bank capital channel literature should now play an important role in evaluating their effectiveness

ratings assignments lessons from international banks this paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country specific variation the empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by fitch ratings are underpinned by fundamental quantitative financial analyses also there is strong evidence of a country effect our model is shown to provide accurate predictions of bank ratings for the period prior to the 2007 2008 banking crisis based upon publicly available information however our results also suggest that quantitative models are not likely to be able to predict ratings with complete accuracy furthermore we find that both quantitative models and rating agencies are likely to produce highly inaccurate predictions of ratings during periods of financial instability

capital requirements and business cycle regimes forward looking modelling of default probabilities abstract this paper proposes a forward looking model for time varying capital requirements which finds application within basel ii the model rests on the relationship between default rates and the business cycle by positing two regimes expansion and recession and by forecasting the associated probabilities the default probability for each rating class is defined as the expected value of a default rate whose distribution is a mixture of an expansion and a recession distribution the application to us data over the forecasting period 1971 2002 provides evidence that the model makes it possible to preserve the risk sensitivity of the capital requirement and at the same time to dampen procyclicality

internal ratings systems implied credit risk and the consistency of banks risk classification policies abstract this paper aims at improving our understanding of internal risk rating systems irs at large banks of the way in which they are implemented and at verifying if irs produce consistent estimates of banks loan portfolio credit risk an important property of our work is that the size of our data set allows us to derive measures of credit risk without making any assumptions about correlations between loans by applying carey s carey mark 1998 credit risk in private debt portfolios journal of finance liii 4 1363 1387 non parametric monte carlo re sampling method we find substantial differences between the implied loss distributions of two banks with equal regulatory risk profiles both expected losses and the credit loss rates at a wide range of loss distribution percentiles vary considerably such variation will translate into different levels of required economic capital our results also confirm the quantitative importance of size for portfolio credit risk for common parameter values we find that tail risk can be reduced by up to 40 by doubling portfolio size our analysis makes clear that not only the formal design of a rating system but also the way in which it is implemented e g a rating grade composition the degree of homogeneity within rating classes can be quantitatively important for the shape of credit loss distributions and thus for banks required capital structure the evidence of differences between lenders also hints at the presence of differentiated market equilibria that are more complex than might otherwise be supposed different lending or risk management styles may emerge and banks strike their own balance between risk taking and the cost of monitoring that risk

rational expectations econometric analysis of changes in regime an investigation of the term structure of interest rates abstract this paper is of interest both for its methodological contribution of new tools for analyzing rational expectations models and for its substantive conclusions concerning the term structure of interest rates during the monetary experiment of october 1979 the paper studies systems subject to changes in regime interpreted here as occasional discrete shifts in the parameters governing the time series behavior of exogenous economic variables the specification is shown to be quite tractable both theoretically and empirically the technique is used to analyze yields on three month treasury bills and ten year treasury bonds during 1962 to 1987 a constant parameter linear model for short term rates is shown to be inconsistent both with the univariate time series properties of short rates and with the observed bivariate relation between long and short rates under the expectations hypothesis of the term structure an alternative nonlinear model that admits the possibility of changes in regime affords a much better description of the univariate process for short rates moreover the cross equation restrictions implied by the expectations hypothesis of the term structure are consistent with the nonlinear specification indeed the residuals of the restricted relation have a standard error of only 0 8 basis points this is a third less than that of a completely unrestricted linear regression of long rates on short rates and compares with an unconditional standard deviation of long rates of 142 basis points i conclude that once the recognition by bond traders of changes in regime is taken into account the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates holds up fairly well for these data

the declining credit quality of u s corporate debt myth or reality in recent years the number of downgrades in corporate bond ratings has exceeded the number of upgrades leading some to conclude that the credit quality of u s corporate debt has declined however an alternative explanation of this apparent decline in credit quality is that the rating agencies are now using more stringent standards in assigning ratings an ordered probit analysis of a panel of firms from 1978 through 1995 suggests that rating standards have indeed become more stringent implying that at least part of the downward trend in ratings is the result of changing standards bond ratings play a key role in corporate financing and investment decisions a corporation that can issue higher rated bonds usually receives better terms than one that can issue only lower rated bonds by law or policy some investors can purchase only bonds with an investment grade rating a restriction which in some asset pricing models would affect the relative prices of financial assets numerous articles in the popular press have presumed that the credit quality of the debt of u s corporations has been declining over the last couple of decades the comprehensive study by lucas and lonski 1992 of moody s rating changes of corporate debt is consistent with this presumption to cite their statistics in 1970 moody s downgraded 21 issues and upgraded 23 issues but over the following years the number of bonds downgraded began to exceed by substantial margins the number of bonds upgraded and by 1990 moody s downgraded 301 issues and upgraded only 61 their study includes both investment and noninvestment grade bonds but internal data from donaldson lufkin jenrette confirm that this trend also applies to investment grade bonds alone in a somewhat different context grundy 1997 documents similar trends in the ratings of preferred shares over the 1965 to 1990 period as the credit quality of a firm s corporate debt decreases that firm will face a greater probability of financial distress which at the extreme translates into bankruptcy there is some debate as to the effect of financial dis

bond illiquidity and excess volatility we find that the empirical volatilities of corporate bond and cds returns are higher than implied by equity return volatilities and the merton model this excess volatility may arise because structural models inadequately capture either fundamentals or illiquidity our evidence supports the latter explanation we find little relation between excess volatility and measures of firm fundamentals and the volatility of firm fundamentals but some relation with variables proxying for time varying illiquidity consistent with an illiquidity explanation firm level bond portfolio returns which average out bond specific effects significantly decrease excess volatility the author 2013 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

spatially rebalancing the uk economy towards a new policy model martin r pike a tyler p and gardiner b spatially rebalancing the uk economy towards a new policy model regional studies the current uk government has announced its intention to rebalance the national economy spatially to create a northern powerhouse to rival that in london and the south east this imbalance is in fact a longstanding problem that 90 years of regional policy has not resolved this paper argues that the entrenched nature of the uk s spatial imbalance derives in part from the centralized nature of the national political economy and that only a bold and radical change in that political economy based on a devolution and decentralization of or economic financial and political power is called for

portfolio optimization through kriging methods abstractthis article presents a new methodology for optimizing financial asset portfolios the proposed methodology based on the kriging method allows for approximating the risk surface and thus the optimal solution to the problem in a generalized fashion relaxing every restrictive hypothesis inherent to the available methods and with the ability to estimate the error in the risk surface approximation illustratively the proposed methodology is applied to the portfolio problem with the variance var and cvar as objective functions the results are compared to those obtained using the khun tucker technique for the former and the rockafellar method for the latter

discrete versus continuous state switching models for portfolio credit risk abstract dynamic models for credit rating transitions are important ingredients for dynamic credit risk analyses we compare the properties of two such models that have recently been put forward the models mainly differ in their treatment of systematic risk which can be modeled either using discrete states e g expansion versus recession or continuous states it turns out that the implied asset correlations and default rate volatilities for discrete state switching models are implausibly low compared to empirical estimates from the literature we conclude that care has to be taken when discrete state regime switching models are employed for dynamic credit risk management as a side result of our analysis we obtain indirect evidence that asset correlations may change over the business cycle

structural shifts in credit rating standards i examine the time series variation in corporate credit rating standards from 1985 to 2007 a divergent pattern exists between investment grade and speculative grade rating standards from 1985 to 2002 as investment grade standards tighten and speculative grade loosen in 2002 a structural shift occurs toward more stringent ratings holding characteristics constant firms experience a drop of 1 5 notches in ratings due to tightened standards from 2002 to 2007 credit spread tests suggest that the variation in standards is not completely due to changes in the economic climate rating standards affect credit spreads loose ratings are associated with higher default rates

is there cyclical bias in bank holding company risk ratings abstract this paper examines whether bank holding company bhc risk ratings are asymmetrically assigned or biased over business cycles from 1986 to 2003 in a model of ratings determination which accounts for bank characteristics financial market conditions past supervisory information and aggregate macro economic factors we find that bank exam ratings exhibit inter temporal characteristics first exam ratings exhibit some evidence of examiner bias for several periods analyzed when the business cycle turns examiners sometime depart from standards that they set during the previous phases of the cycle however this bias is not widespread or systematic second exam ratings exhibit some inertia our results suggest that examiners rate on the side of not changing rather than upgrading or downgrading an institution s exam rating third we find robust evidence of a secular trend towards more stringent examination bhc ratings standards over time

financial structure and aggregate economic activity an overview this paper surveys literature that explores the possible links between the financial system and aggregate economic behavior the survey is in two parts the first reviews the traditional work and the second discusses new research copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

credit ratings and stock liquidity we analyze contemporaneous and predictive relations between credit ratings and measures of equity market liquidity and find that common measures of adverse selection which reflect a portion of the uncertainty about future firm value are larger when credit ratings are poorer we also show that future rating changes can be predicted using current levels of adverse selection collectively our results validate widely used microstructure measures of adverse selection and offer new insights into the value of credit ratings and the specific nature of the information they contain copyright 2006 oxford university press

the information content of municipal bond rating changes a note municipal bond rating changes have positive social value if they signal previously unavailable information on changes in municipal financial soundness weinstein 11 has found that rating changes for corporate bonds do not appear to contain relevant new information his finding is consistent with that of pinches and singleton 7 that stock price adjustments occurred several months prior to a corporate bond rating change rating agencies apparently respond to changes in corporate financial and operating conditions several months after the information is impounded in bond and stock prices 1 however as a result of institutional differences between corporate and municipal bond markets it is possible that rating changes for municipal bonds do convey new information this note examines the information content of municipal bond rating changes by evaluating municipal bond price adjustments during the period surrounding a rating change the joint hypothesis tested is that municipal bond rating changes convey information to investors which is relevant for assessing equilibrium values of the securities and that the municipal bond market is efficient so that valuation changes occur simultaneously with rating changes the following section examines the institutional setting of the municipal bond market in order to specify why information content of bond rating changes might be anticipated remaining sections of the paper describe sample selection derivation of test data findings and discussion

monetary shocks equity returns and volatility a firm level panel data analysis abstractthis article studies the impact of monetary policy shocks on equity returns and their volatility among nine industries and their affiliated firms in the united states we use an extension of the traditional capm as the analytical framework and approximate policy shocks with the unexpected component of the federal funds rate data on the characteristics of firms and industries are obtained from compustat and the center for research in security prices covering a sample period from 1987 to 2009 our results clearly show that responses to policy shocks vary by industry and across firms furthermore credit availability matters in certain industries and small financially constrained and bank dependent firms are found to be more vulnerable to unexpected federal funds rate shocks

empirical credit cycles and capital buffer formation abstract we model 1927 1997 us business failure rates using an unobserved components time series model clear evidence is found of cyclical behavior in default rates we also detect significant longer term movements in default rates and default correlations in a multi year backtest experiment we show that accommodation of default rate dynamics has important consequences for credit risk capitalization requirements static or myopic variants of credit portfolio models miss significant periods of credit risk accumulation empirically congruent dynamic models by contrast provide more timely warning signals of credit risk build up in this way they may mitigate some of the pro cyclicality concerns

cross listed bonds information asymmetry and conservatism in credit ratings we propose information asymmetry as an additional explanation for rating conservatism because information asymmetry is likely higher for cross listed bonds than for u s bonds we expect and find that cross listed bonds are rated more conservatively than u s domestic bonds at issuance further cross listed bonds receive less frequent upgrades and take longer to be upgraded after issuance because lower ratings might also reflect higher default risk based on agencies private information we conduct additional tests to discriminate between the rating conservatism and private information explanations the results are consistent with ratings conservatism and inconsistent with the private information explanation

are credit ratings procyclical abstract this paper studies the influence of the state of the business cycle on credit ratings in particular we assess whether rating agencies are excessively procyclical in their assignment of ratings our analysis is based on a model of ratings determination that takes into account factors that measure the business and financial risks of firms in addition to indicators of macroeconomic conditions utilizing annual data on all us firms rated by standard poor s we find that ratings do not generally exhibit excess sensitivity to the business cycle in addition we document that previously reported findings of a secular tightening of ratings standards are not robust to a more complete accounting of systematic changes to measures of risk

optimal retirement with unemployment risks abstract this paper investigates the optimal retirement of an individual in the presence of involuntary unemployment risks and borrowing constraints in a complete market with frictions we use an intensity model and loading factors to illustrate the involuntary unemployment risks and frictions in unemployment insurance markets using reasonably calibrated parameters we observe that high involuntary unemployment intensity and loading factors could be important explanations for the empirical findings emphasized in recent studies we also find that an individual with high leisure demand after retirement reduces consumption during retirement and increases stockholdings as retirement time approaches

debt maturity and asymmetric information evidence from default risk changes asymmetric information models suggest that a borrower s choice of debt maturity depends on its private information about its default probabilities that is borrowers with favorable information prefer short term debt while those with unfavorable information prefer long term debt we test this implication by tracing the evolution of debt issuers default risk following debt issuances we find that short term debt issuance leads to a decline inborrowers asset volatility and an increase in their distance to default the opposite is true for long term debt issues the results suggest that borrowers private information about their default risk is an important determinant of their debt maturity choices

have rating agencies become more conservative implications for capital structure and debt pricing rating agencies have become more conservative in assigning corporate credit ratings over the period 1985 to 2009 holding firm characteristics constant average ratings have dropped by three notches this change does not appear to be fully warranted because defaults have declined over this period firms affected more by conservatism issue less debt have lower leverage hold more cash are less likely to obtain a debt rating and experience lower growth their debt spreads are lower than those of unaffected firms with the same rating which implies that the market partly undoes the impact of conservatism on debt prices this evidence suggests that firms and capital markets do not perceive the increase in conservatism to be fully warranted

immobility and insecure labour markets an active response to precarious employment this article explores how people experience and respond to a post industrial labour market context through residential im mobility focusing on places that are represented through a range of offic

mean reversion in equilibrium asset prices this paper demonstrates that negative serial correlation in long horizon stock returns is consistent with an equilibrium model of asset pricing when investors display only a moderate desire to smooth their consumption commonly used measures of mean reversion in stock prices calculated from historical returns data nearly always lie within a 60 percent confidence interval of the median of the monte carlo distributions implied by the authors equilibrium model from this evidence the authors conclude that the degree of serial correlation in the data could plausibly have been generated by their model copyright 1990 by american economic association

ratings migration and the business cycle with application to credit portfolio stress testing the turmoil in the capital markets in 1997 and 1998 has highlighted the need for systematic stress testing of banks portfolios including both their trading and lending books we propose that underlying macroeconomic volatility is a key part of a useful conceptual framework for stress testing credit portfolios and that credit migration matrices provide the specific linkages between underlying macroeconomic conditions and asset quality credit migration matrices which characterize the expected changes in credit quality of obligors are cardinal inputs to many applications including portfolio risk assessment modeling the term structure of credit risk premia and pricing of credit derivatives they are also an integral part of many of the credit portfolio models used by financial institutions by separating the economy into two states or regimes expansion and contraction and conditioning the migration matrix on these states we show that the loss distribution of credit portfolios can differ greatly as can the concomitant level of economic capital to be assigned

simulation based stress tests of banks regulatory capital adequacy abstract banks holding of reasonable capital buffers in excess of minimum requirements could alleviate the procyclicality problem potentially exacerbated by the rating sensitive capital charges of basel ii determining the sufficient buffer size is an important risk management task for banks which the basel committee suggests should be approached via stress testing we present here a simulation based approach to stress testing of regulatory capital adequacy where rating transitions are conditioned on business cycle phase and which takes into account business cycle dynamics our approach is an extension of a typical credit portfolio analysis in that we simulate actual bank capital and minimum capital requirements simultaneously actual bank capital absent mark to market accounting is driven by bank income and default losses whereas capital requirements within basel ii are driven by rating transitions the joint dynamics of these determine the necessary capital buffers given a confidence level for regulatory capital adequacy chosen by bank management we provide a tentative calibration of this confidence level to data on actual bank capital ratios which enables a ceteris paribus extrapolation of bank capital under the current regime to bank capital under basel ii

asymmetric effects of the business cycle on bank credit risk abstract prior empirical research on the relation between credit risk and the business cycle has failed to properly investigate the presence of asymmetric effects to fill this gap we examine this relation both at the aggregate and the bank level exploiting a unique dataset on italian banks borrowers default rates we employ threshold regression models that allow to endogenously establish different regimes identified by the thresholds over below which credit risk is more less cyclical we find that not only are the effects of the business cycle on credit risk more pronounced during downturns but cyclicality is also higher for those banks with riskier portfolios

recovery rates default probabilities and the credit cycle in recessions the number of defaulting firms rises on top of this the average amount recovered on the bonds of defaulting firms tends to decrease this paper proposes an econometric model in which this joint time variation in default rates and recovery rate distributions is driven by an unobserved markov chain which we interpret as the credit cycle this model is shown to fit better than models in which this joint time variation is driven by observed macroeconomic variables we use the model to quantitatively assess the importance of allowing for systematic time variation in recovery rates which is often ignored in risk management and pricing models

does rating analyst subjectivity affect corporate debt pricing we find evidence of systematic optimism and pessimism among credit analysts comparing contemporaneous ratings of the same firm across rating agencies these differences in perspectives carry through to debt prices and negatively predict future changes in credit spreads consistent with mispricing moreover the pricing effects are the largest among firms that are the most opaque likely exacerbating financing constraints we find that masters of business administration mbas provide higher quality ratings however optimism increases and accuracy decreases with tenure covering the firm our analysis demonstrates the role analysts play in shaping investor expectations and its effect on corporate debt markets

the influence of rating levels and rating convergence on the spillover effects of sovereign credit actions abstract this paper assesses contagion and competition as alternative types of stock market spillovers arising from sovereign rating actions our research design is based on the premise that the type of spillover effects within and between groups of countries will be influenced by the sovereign rating level split ratings and the extent of rating convergence i e specific types of rating action will induce different and or stronger effects the results reveal a clear pattern whereby downgrades of high rated countries induce contagion to both high and low rated countries while downgrades of low rated countries reveal the opposite i e they induce competitive effects split ratings are found to intensify stock market spillover effects rating convergence divergence across similarly rated sovereigns has a meaningful influence on the spillover effects for the downgrades of high rated countries rating convergence mitigates the contagion effect to other high rated countries in the region but has very limited effect on the contagion to low rated countries for downgrades of low rated countries rating convergence strengthens the competitive effect on other low rated countries but has little effect on the competitive impact on high rated countries

credit rating and debt crises we develop an equilibrium theory of credit rating in the presence of rollover risk by influencing rational creditors ratings affect sovereigns probability of default which in turn affects ratings our analysis reveals a pro cyclical impact of credit rating in equilibrium the presence of a rating agency increases default risk when it is high and decreases default risk when it is low

a hidden markov model of credit quality abstract this paper presents a hidden markov model of credit quality dynamics and highlights the use of filtering based estimation methods for models of this kind we suppose that the markov chain governing the true credit quality evolution is hidden in noisy or incomplete observations represented by posted credit ratings parameters of the model namely credit transition probabilities are estimated using the em algorithm filtering methods provide recursive updates of optimal estimates so the model is self calibrating the estimation procedure is illustrated with an application to a data set of standard poor s credit ratings