This paper surveys the current state of the Chinese debt capital markets. As judged by its size and sophistication of its infrastructure the Chinese bond market it is already a leading market globally. China is unusual in that non-financial corporate issues account for a large fraction of the...

In their recent provocative book Why Nations Fail, political scientist Daron Acemoglu and economist James A. Robinson contend that nations fail when they become “extractive” in their exercise of political power. According to the authors, the neoliberal system of market-centred competition...

Sovereign bond issuance by emerging market countries is growing in both volume and frequency. The global credit rating agencies have eagerly assigned ratings to the new issuers. Traditional approaches to measuring country risk, however, may fall short when applied to developing economies. What...

Can a negative shock to sovereign ratings invoke a vicious cycle of increasing government bond yields and further downgrades, ultimately pushing a country toward default? The narratives of public and political discussions, as well as of some widely cited papers, suggest this possibility. In this...

In the present paper, we build a bivariate semiparametric dynamic panel model to reproduce the joint dynamics of sovereign ratings and government bond yields. While the individual equations resemble Pesaran-type cointegration models, we allow for different long-run relationships in both...

The three major credit rating agencies have reassessed sovereign credit risks in the light of the Great Financial Crisis, increasing the transparency of their methodologies. This has resulted in material shifts in the rank-ordering of risks. Simple statistical models explain the lion's share of...

This paper studies the influence of external financial factors on economic activity in emerging economies (EMEs) motivated by a considerable increase in foreign financing by the corporate sector in EMEs since the early 2000s, mainly in the form of bond issuance. A quarterly external financial...

Der vorliegende Aufsatz untersucht die Ursachen von Finanzmarktkrisen anhand entsprechender Vorkommnisse in Thailand, Mexiko und Tschechien, um risikoreiche Konstellationen für Emerging Markets zu identifizieren. Als Modell wurde der Ansatz von Sachs/Tornell/Velasco (1996) gewählt, der durch...

We study the sovereign default model that has been used to account for the cyclical behavior of interest rates in emerging market economies. This model is often solved using the discrete state space technique with evenly spaced grid points. We show that this method necessitates a large number of...