Impact of Sovereign Credit Rating Disclosure on Chinese Financial Market

Abstract

The sustainable economic role of the financial markets is essential for a trade-dependent economy such as China. Notably, the Chinese financial market has shown some unpleasant trends over the past two decades, coupled with the mounting national debt. Most of the earlier literature on the impact of the sovereign credit rating (SCR) on the financial market development (FMD) of China is confined to the event study approach, which provides policy input for short-term decision making. In this scenario, it is worthwhile investigating how the SCR asymmetrically affected the FMD of China and the threshold point (level) where the relationship of SCR-FMD turns non-linear. The Non-Linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag model’s empirical findings show that the reaction of FMD to SCR disclosure is asymmetric. In addition, the result of the threshold estimator finds a single threshold level of 3.628 above which the relationship of SCR-FMD turns non-linear. It is important to note that up to a threshold of 3.628 the coefficient is −.516 and −.627 which turns positive afterwards, no matter whether the variation explained is relatively less with the coefficient of .058 and .056 respectively. This implies that policymakers and regulators need to consider this benchmark of 3.628 to formulate future policy matters related to the equity market.