This paper analyzes the impact and the spillover effect of a sovereign rating announcement on the euro area CDS market. Through the event study technique, we demonstrate that downgrades and upgrades considerably affect financial markets. The relevance of the impact is due to the introduction of...

We analyze the impact of sovereign rating changes on European corporate loan spreads. We demonstrate that sovereign downgrades lead to significant increases in the spread of loans to domestic firms. We find evidence that the negative effects of a sovereign downgrade are widespread across all...

We verify the effects of sovereign rating revisions on the activity of European banks, in terms of their regulatory capital ratio, profitability, liquidity, and lending supply. First, we find that a sovereign downgrade has a significant impact, primarily on capital ratios and lending supply. In...

We analyze the difference between credit default swap (CDS) and syndicated loan spreads, defined as the “CDS-loan basis”. Our results indicate that the CDS-loan basis is greater when the cost of information asymmetry is higher, such as for riskier borrowers and in economic downturns. Our...