The eight local currency bond markets in which the Asian Bond Funds 2 (ABF2) invests have continued to develop since 2011. But the development of corporate bonds continues to lag that of government bonds. We focus on areas where we believe there remains work to be done to foster corporate bond...

This paper highlights relative price adjustments taking place in the global economy as important sources of the lower levels of inflation rates observed in the recent decades. Using a markup model, it shows substantial effects from declines in wage costs and import prices relative to consumer...

This paper investigates dislocations in the foreign exchange (FX) swap market between the US dollar and three major European currencies. After the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, deviations from covered interest parity (CIP) were negatively associated with the creditworthiness of...

The three major rating agencies are reassessing banks' credit risk in the light of the recent crisis. So far, this has resulted in material downgrades, especially of European and US institutions, and increased agreement about banks' overall level of creditworthiness and their greater dependence...

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, many jurisdictions in Asia strengthened their approaches to loan loss provisioning, including the adoption of discretionary measures. This has contributed to stronger banking systems in the region.

This paper focuses on the sovereign segment of the credit default swap (CDS) market, examining data covering several years of quotes and trades from an important CDS inter-dealer broker. Compared to corporate or bank CDSs, sovereign CDSs are concentrated in fewer names and in contracts with...

The covered bond market offers investors an alternative to developed country government securities. The valuation of covered bonds is complex. While there is some evidence of differences in the pricing of these bonds by nationality of issuer, these appear to be only weakly related to differences...

We examine in a unified framework three recent perspectives on country risk=debt intolerance, original sin, and currency mismatches. We find statistical evidence supporting aspects of all three, though the strength of that support varies considerably across hypotheses and a number of open...

Derivatives markets in emerging economies have continued to grow since 2010, driven mostly by very strong growth in the OTC market. Emerging market currencies have become more international as offshore markets are a major contributor to FX turnover. The Chinese renminbi is actively traded within...