The effects of crisis on the interbank marketsand sovereign risk: empirical investigations

The 2007-2008 global financial turmoil is the most severe crisis since the Great Depression. Starting with the sub-prime defaults in the United States, it quickly spills over into other markets leading to the collapses of many financial institutions, worldwide banks bailouts, downturns in asset prices and also to sovereign debt crises. The aim of this thesis is to empirically investigate the repercussions of this financial crisis on interbank market and sovereign risk. In Chapter one, we empirically explore the effect of bank lending relationships in the interbank market. We use data from the e-MID market that represents the only transparent electronic platform in Europe and the United States, unaffected by search costs and other actions. We show that stable relationships exist and that they play a significant role during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Trading with preferred counterparts is associated with more favorable rates for both lenders and borrowers, and carries larger trading volumes. The results point to a peer monitoring role of relationship lending, which contributes, at a time of financial distress, to a smooth liquidity redistribution among banks. Relationship lending thus plays an important positive role for financial stability. Chapter two investigates the role of banks' network centrality in the interbank market on their funding rates. Specifically we analyze transaction data from the e-MID market, over the 2006-2009 period, which encompasses the global financial crisis. We show that interbank spreads are significantly affected by both local and global measures of connectedness. The effects of network centrality increased as the financial crisis evolved. Local measures show that having more links increases borrowing costs for borrowers and reduces premia for lenders. For global network centrality, borrowers receive a significant discount if they increase their intermediation activity and become more central, while lenders pay in general a premium (i.e. receive lower rates) for centrality. This provides evidence of the `too-interconnected-to-fail' hypothesis. Chapter three draws attention to the effect of monetary policies and international linkages on European countries sovereign risks. Using a Global VAR method that allows for interdependencies across individual variables within and across units, we model government bond credit default swaps (CDS) relative to Germany by domestic, global, monetary and weighted foreign variables, where weights are calculated based on the countries' fiscal positions. We find evidence of positive correlation between sovereign bond CDS and risk aversion for almost all countries in the eurozone. When the European Central Bank (ECB) increases the refinancing rate, we observe an increase in risk of sovereign bonds of all countries due to negative environment in Euro area. A decline in money aggregate (M3) leads to all countries becoming more fragile, hence increasing sovereign risk. The shocks that stem from monetary policy changes (i.e. an increase in ECB refinancing rate) causes a rise in sovereign risk due to sensitivity to crisis and uncertainty in Euro area. In contrast, monetary policies have an opposite impact on Greece due to its relative worse performance.