Corporate Credit Spreads Research Articles

Managerial myopia and corporate credit spreads

Using bond issuance data from listed companies, we demonstrate that firms with myopic management face substantially higher credit spreads, a pattern with both strong statistical and economic significance across multiple robustness checks. Myopic management tends to imprudently allocate longer-term funds to short-term projects, potentially prompting investors to demand higher credit premiums. The rise in credit spreads observed only in long-term bond issuances further reinforces our argument. Inefficient investment decisions made by myopic management, characterized by excessive short-term investments and insufficient long-term investments, may also account for elevated credit spreads. While effective corporate governance and enhanced external monitoring can help alleviate the adverse impacts of managerial myopia on corporate credit spreads, intensified industry competition and increased uncertainty may exacerbate these challenges. Encouragingly, the elevated credit spreads could prompt myopic management to adjust their business strategies, thereby mitigating the worsening economic consequences for the corporate.

Reassessing the inversion of the Treasury yield curve as a sign of U.S. recessions: Insights from the housing and credit markets

Is yield curve inversion a reliable recession signal? Prior research on forecasting recessions investigates the role of the slope of the yield curve, housing, banking, and corporate credit spreads in isolation, without fully considering their interconnectedness. Therefore, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the ability of house prices, residential investment, bank aggregate liquidity creation (LC) and credit (BC), and corporate credit spreads to forecast recessions. For the 1973–2023 sample, after accounting for the slope of the yield curve, our in- and out-of-sample results show that: i) house prices and credit spreads signal recessions—house prices decline, and credit spreads rise ahead of recession quarters; ii) residential investment’s recession forecasting ability is not as robust as house prices; iii) the recession forecasting ability of LC or BC diminishes when we include other indicators. These findings provide important insights into the interconnectedness among economic indicators and their relationship with recessions. Importantly, we demonstrate that the inversion of the yield curve alone is not the surest sign of a recession. For a recession to occur, house prices must decline, and corporate credit spreads must significantly increase.

Do corporate credit spreads predict the real economy?

We evaluate whether corporate credit-spreads measures contain predictive information about the real U.S. economy in a comprehensive specification that includes financial sectors’ profitability, stock and bond market. We find that corporate credit spreads contain no predictive information about U.S. real GDP or consumption and that corporate credit spreads have minimal information about forthcoming recessions. In comparison, the financial sector’s profitability, the Treasury bond and stock market variables contain leading information about recessions, consumption and real GDP.

Political turnover and corporate credit spread: Evidence from China

Using hand-collected data on changes of government officials in 288 Chinese cities from 2002 to 2018, we examine how political turnover affects corporate credit spread in China. We find that political turnover leads to an increase in corporate credit spread. This result is robust after using PSM method and Heckman method to control the endogeneity concerns. The effect is more significant in bonds close to maturity, SOEs and Local SOEs, areas with officials not be promoted and unexpected, and during a market boom. Moreover, we examine whether this effect is a reasonable choice for creditors. We find that political turnover can increase both the default probability and the financial risk of companies.

Partisan conflict and corporate credit spreads: The role of political connection

This paper documents the positive impact of partisan conflict on corporate credit spreads for politically connected companies and industries. The effect is both economically meaningful and statistically significant, stands under an extensive set of control variables, and is stronger for speculative-grade bonds. Several approaches are adopted to resolve endogeneity issues and further establish causality. Partisan conflict affects corporate credit spreads through a discount rate channel, increases investors’ risk aversion, and leads to higher borrowing costs and widening credit spreads. Affected companies respond by reducing debt issuance and postponing investments until the conflict subsides.

Forecasting corporate credit spreads: regime-switching in LSTM

A long short-term memory model (LSTM) which utilises regime-switching state information as a feature to predict the change of credit spreads is developed. Latent changes in the market are filtered out from observable credit spread time series. These hidden information of regime changes are incorporated into an LSTM, where the state probability is utilised as a feature for one-step ahead predictions of the credit spreads. Firstly, time series from corporate credit spreads are modelled through a Hidden Markov model (HMM) which is based on a discretised Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. State-related information of the Markov chain, like the jump frequency and state occupation time hidden in the observed spreads are filtered out and adaptive HMM filters are built to estimate probabilities of hidden market states. The performance of the LSTM with regime-switching information is analysed and compared to the accuracy of a pure LSTM without state features. Furthermore, purely utilising the HMM forecast, the prediction of the credit spread is compared to the prediction within the LSTM. Beyond a simulations study, the HMM-LSTM model is calibrated on corporate credit spreads from three European countries between 2004 and 2019. The findings show that the LSTM forecast error is improved when regime information is added, mostly in cases with stronger market fluctuations.

Procyclical Credit Rating Policy*

AbstractThis paper examines whether credit rating agencies applied consistent rating standards to US corporate bonds in the periods surrounding the 2008 financial crisis. Based on estimates of issuing firms' credit quality from a structural model, I find that rating standards are in fact procyclical: ratings are stricter during an economic downturn than during an economic expansion. As a result, firms receive overly pessimistic ratings in a recession, relative to during an expansion. I further show that a procyclical rating policy amplifies the variation in corporate credit spreads, accounting for, on average, 11% of the increase in spreads during a recession. In the cross‐section, firms with a higher rollover rate of debt, fewer alternative channels to convey their credit quality to the market, and firms with businesses that are more sensitive to economic cycles are more affected by the procyclical rating policy.

Global Flight to Safety, Business Cycles, and the Dollar

We develop a two-country macroeconomic model that we fit to a set of aggregate prices and quantities for the U.S. and the rest of the world. In addition to a standard array of shocks, the model includes time variation in agents’ preference for safe bonds. We allow for a component of this time variation to be common across countries and biased toward dollar-denominated safe assets, and refer to this component as global flight to safety (GFS). We find that GFS shocks are the most important shocks driving world business cycles, and are also important drivers of activity in the U.S. and especially abroad. An adverse GFS shock lowers global GDP and inflation, widens global corporate credit spreads, and appreciates the dollar. These effects are very close to those obtained from a structural VAR which uses the excess bond premium (Gilchrist and Zakrajšek, 2012) as proxy for global flight to safety.

글로벌 회사채 스프레드에 대한 경기요인 영향력 분석

Purpose - This paper investigates how business cycle impacts on corporate credit spreads since global financial crisis. Furthermore, it tests how the impact changes by the phase of the cycle.
 Design/methodology/approach - This study collected dataset from Barclays Global Aggregate Bond Index through the Bloomberg. It conducted multi-regression analysis by projecting business cycle using Hodrick-Prescott filtering and various cyclical variables, while ran dynamic analysis of 5-variable Vector Error Correction Model to confirm the robustness of the test.
 Findings - First, it proves to be statistically significant that corporate credit spreads have moved countercyclicaly since the crisis. Second, It indicates that the corporate credit spread’s countercyclicality to the macroeconomic changes works symmetrically by the phase of the cycle. Third, the VECM supports that business cycle’s impact on the spreads maintains more sustainably than other explanatory variable does in the model.
 Research implications or Originality - It becomes more appealing to accurately measure the real economic impact on corporate credit spreads as the interaction between credit and business cycle deepens. The economic impact on the spreads works symmetrically by boom and bust, which implies that the market stress could impact as another negative driver during the bust. Finally, the business cycle’s sustainable impact on the spreads supports the fact that the economic recovery is the key driver for the resilience of credit cycle.

Credit Constraints and Bank Failures: A Macroprudential Perspective on the U.S. Commercial Banking Sector

We examine the impact of economy wide credit tightening on bank failures and investigate the relationship between bank failures and tighter monetary policy while accounting for bank balance sheet variables. Using a sample of U.S. banks from 1984 to 2020, we find the following: i) increases in corporate credit spreads lead to a significant increase in aggregate bank failures; ii) lower aggregate bank return on equity and higher allowances for loan losses are associated with a higher incidence of bank failures; iii) no robust evidence suggesting that tighter monetary policy drives higher bank failures. Finally, we show that lower bank failures, contraction in corporate credit spreads, higher bank profitability, and higher stock market returns contribute to higher economic growth, highlighting the interconnectedness of banking, stock markets, credit availability, and the macro-economy. These results may have potential macro-prudential policy implications.

Economic Policy Uncertainty, World Uncertainty, and Economic Growth: Evidence from a Bayesian Vector Autoregression Analysis

This paper examines the relationship between the information content of newspaper-based Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) country report-based World Uncertainty (WUI) indices in relation to U.S. economic growth. Using data from 1990 to 2022 and incorporating a number of variables known to predict economic growth, our findings demonstrate the following: i) Based on different measures of WUI, whether U.S.-specific or global, and under various model specifications, we find that WUI is an important measure of uncertainty that negatively impacts real GDP growth. ii) EPU consistently exhibits a counterintuitive positive relationship with economic growth. iii) Variables such as corporate credit spreads and oil prices show a robust negative relationship with real GDP growth, while stock market returns are positively and robustly related to economic growth, underlying the importance of prices of financial assets and commodities for gauging the health of the economy.

Forecasting Economic Growth: Evidence from housing, banking, and credit conditions

Previous studies on economic growth have separately examined the role of housing, banking, and credit market conditions, despite their interrelatedness. Therefore, this paper comprehensively investigates the relative importance of four indicators [house prices, residential investment, corporate credit spreads, and aggregate bank liquidity creation (LC)] to forecast U.S. real GDP growth. We do so after accounting for a comprehensive set of other predictors and aim to identify indicators that better forecast economic growth. Our in-and out-of-sample results show that house prices and corporate credit spreads predict real GDP growth better than residential investment and LC. Moreover, shocks to house prices and corporate credit spreads have a greater impact on real GDP growth and other macroeconomic indicators than shocks to LC and residential investment. Furthermore, house prices have the largest positive impact on inflation and the largest negative effect on unemployment. These results may have potential monetary policy implications.

Are Liquidity and Credit Risk Key Determinants of Corporate Credit Spreads (CCS) in India?

Are Liquidity and Credit Risk Key Determinants of Corporate Credit Spreads (CCS) in India?

Pricing the Pandemic: Evidence from the Bond Market in China

ABSTRACT This study investigates whether and how the pandemic is priced in the bond market in China. Using the city-level COVID-19 cases on a daily basis, we find a significant positive relationship between the pandemic outbreak and corporate credit spreads, implying that investor risk perception on pandemic exposure attracts a premium. Consistent with the default risk channel, corporate financial resilience alleviates pandemic pricing. Information asymmetry and tail risk can amplify the pricing effect because of reduced investor risk-bearing capacity. These findings are robust in addressing endogeneity concerns. We contribute to the emerging literature on the pandemic effect on credit markets.

ESG and corporate credit spreads

PurposeThe authors investigate the implications of environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices of firms for the pricing of their credit default swaps (CDS). In doing so, the authors compare European and US firms and consider nonlinear and indirect effects. This complements the previous literature focusing on linear and direct effects using bond yields and credit ratings of US firms.Design/methodology/approachFor this purpose, the authors apply fixed effects regressions on a comprehensive panel data set of US and European firms. Further, nonlinear and indirect effects are investigated utilizing quantile regressions and a path analysis.FindingsThe evidence indicates that higher ESG ratings mitigate credit risks of US and European firms from 2007 to 2019. The risk mitigation effect is U-shaped across ESG quantiles, which is consistent with opposing effects of growing stakeholder influence capacity and diminishing marginal returns on ESG investments. The authors further reveal a mediating indirect volatility channel that substantially amplifies the direct effect of ESG on credit risk. A one-standard-deviation improvement in ESG ratings is estimated to reduce CDS spreads of low, medium and high ESG firms by approximately 4%, 8% and 3%, respectively.Originality/valueThis is the first study to examine whether credit markets reflect regional differences between Europe and the US with regard to the ESG-CDS-relationship. In addition, this paper contributes to the existing literature by investigating differences in the response of CDS spreads across ESG quantiles and to study potential indirect channels connecting ESG and CDS spreads using structural credit risk variables.

Credit spreads in the European green bond market: A daily analysis of the COVID‐19 pandemic impact

AbstractFinancial crises and economic downturns provide a unique opportunity to investigate the behavior of investors and financial instruments and shed light in the market's anticipation of future economic growth. In view of the current crisis, we examine how the COVID‐19 pandemic affected the European green bond market. Using daily data from Thomson Reuter's Refinitiv, we conducted event studies on corporate credit spread changes over the period from January 1 to December 31, 2020. Our results reveal that green bonds' credit spreads increased significantly after the start of the coronavirus outbreak. However, as the fear of the pandemic eased in response to positive news about the vaccines, green bonds' credit spreads fell below conventional bonds. Overall, green bonds showed a higher risk exposure and lower resilience to distress while profiting during an upside. Our paper provides the first evidence about the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic and the announcement of vaccines' effectiveness on the European corporate green bond market. Our results suggest several key points that are relevant to both investors and issuers under the unprecedented conditions created by the pandemic.

Consumer Confidence and Corporate Credit Spreads

Consumer Confidence and Corporate Credit Spreads

Macroeconomic and Financial Risks: A Tale of Mean and Volatility

<ns3:p>We study the joint conditional distribution of GDP growth and corporate credit spreads using a stochastic volatility VAR. Our estimates display significant cyclical co-movement in uncertainty (the volatility implied by the conditional distributions), and risk (the probability of tail events) between the two variables. We also find that the interaction between two shocks--a main business cycle shock as in Angeletos et al. (2020) and a main financial shock--is crucial to account for the variation in uncertainty and risk, especially around crises. Our results highlight the importance of using multivariate nonlinear models to understand the determinants of uncertainty and risk.</ns3:p>

Can Trustees Be Trusted? Relation Between Corporate Bond Trustees and Credit Spreads

ABSTRACT To protect the interest of the investors, the corporate bond market in China has implemented a trustee system. However, before the first bond default happened in 2014, implicit government guarantee for the issuers ensured a market with zero default. In recent years, the rising amount of corporate bond defaults has ignited concerns about the credit risk and brings China’s underdeveloped trustee system to authorities’ attention. Based on the textual content of the trustee reports from 2013 to 2018, this paper examines the association between the textual content of trustee reports and the credit spreads. Results show that the extent of risk disclosure in trustee reports is positively correlated with the credit spreads. Furthermore, a higher positivity of the trustee reports is associated with lower credit spreads. These results reveal the monitoring and informational role of the trustees in China. Also, incremental explanatory power of the trustees lends support for improving corporate bond risk management.

Corporate bond market reactions to quantitative easing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using transaction data from the first half of 2020, we examine the reaction of corporate credit spreads to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy announcements. We find evidence that the bond markets are segmented across credit ratings, which led to different initial reactions across bonds with different credit ratings but spread across various sectors of corporate bonds over the longer event window. To quantify the default risk channel of quantitative easing, we apply the variance decomposition approach to credit spreads and find that a significant fraction of credit spread changes indeed correspond to reduced default risk caused by the corporate bond purchase program. In contrast, we only find mixed evidence for the liquidity channel driving the market reaction.