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Might the impact of the financial stress on exchange markets be asymmetric and exposed to regime changes? Departing from the existing literature, highlighting that the domestic and foreign financial stress in terms of money market have substantial effects on exchange market, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of the bond yield spreads of three emerging countries (Mexico, Russia, and South Korea) on their exchange market pressure indices using monthly observations for the period 2010:01–2019:12. Additionally, the paper analyses the impact of bond yield spread of the US on the exchange market pressure indices of the three mentioned emerging countries. The authors hypothesized whether the negative and positive changes in the bond yield spreads have varying effects on exchange market pressure indices.

To address the research question, we measure the bond yield spread of the selected countries by using the interest rate spread between 10-year and 3-month treasury bills. At the same time, the exchange market pressure index is proxied by the index introduced by Desai et al. (2017). We base the empirical analysis on nonlinear vector autoregression (VAR) models and an asymmetric quantile-based approach.

The results of the impulse response functions indicate that increases/decreases in the bond yield spreads of Mexico, Russia and South Korea raise/lower their exchange market pressure, and the effects of shocks in the bond yield spreads of the US also lead to depreciation/appreciation pressures in the local currencies of the emerging countries. The quantile connectedness analysis, which allows for the role of regimes, reveals that the weights of the domestic and foreign bond yield spread in explaining variations of exchange market pressure indices are higher when exchange market pressure indices are not in a normal regime, indicating the role of extreme development conditions in the exchange market. The quantile regression model underlines that an increase in the domestic bond yield spread leads to a rise in its exchange market pressure index during all exchange market pressure periods in Mexico, and the relevant effects are valid during periods of high exchange market pressure in Russia. Our results also show that Russia differs from Mexico and South Korea in terms of the factors influencing the demand for domestic currency, and we have demonstrated the role of domestic macroeconomic and financial conditions in surpassing the effects of US financial stress. More specifically, the impacts of the domestic and foreign financial stress vary across regimes and are asymmetric.

This study enriches the literature on factors affecting the exchange market pressure of emerging countries. The results have significant economic implications for policymakers, indicating that the exchange market pressure index may trigger a financial crisis and economic recession.

This study investigates the impacts of operational risks and corporate governance on bond yield spreads, examining their impacts on bond yield spreads during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results indicate that operational risks significantly raise yield spreads, especially for high-leverage firms. Moreover, a higher independent director percentage reduces debt costs. Furthermore, the results reveal more pronounced effects of operational risks on yield spreads during the COVID-19 pandemic, with these risks increasing the financing costs for large firms. When the effect of the independent director percentage on the yield spreads increases, this consequently raises the debt costs for large firms.

This study aims to investigate how high-speed railway (HSR) development affects urban construction investment (UCI) bond yield spreads based on China’s background.

This study constructs a quasi-natural experiment and adopts regression analyses to empirically examine the relation between HSR development and UCI bond yield spreads. The empirical analysis is based on a Chinese sample of 15,109 bond offering observations from 2008 to 2019.

The results show that HSR development reduces UCI bond yield spreads. Mechanistic analysis shows that HSR development increases land prices and the level of urbanization, which in turn lowers the UCI bond yield spreads. In addition, the impact of HSR development on UCI bond yield spreads is more significant at higher marketization levels and lower degrees of dependence on land finance cities where UCI corporations are located.

The results imply that transportation infrastructure improvement, such as HSR development, helps to enhance the credit of local governments and the solvency of UCI corporations and ultimately reduces the financing cost of UCI bonds.

This paper provides theoretical support and empirical evidence for the impact of transportation infrastructure construction on the implicit debt risks of local governments in China, which enriches the research on the “HSR economy” from a micro perspective and expands the research on the influencing factors of local governments’ debt risk.

The question is whether debt market investors see through managers' attempts to hide their pension obligations. The authors establish a robust relation between understated pension liabilities and corporate bond yield spreads after controlling for factors that have been previously identified as having a significant impact on firms' cost of borrowing. The results support the idea that bond market investors are not being misled by the use of high pension liability discount rates by some companies to lower their reported pension obligations. For a small fraction of debt issuers, the reported pension liabilities are larger than the pension liabilities valued at the stipulated interest rate benchmarks. For these issuers with overstated pension liabilities, bond investors adjust their borrowing costs downward.

The authors investigate the relation between corporate bond yield spreads and understated pension liabilities relative to long-term Treasury and high-grade corporate bond yields. They aim to answer two questions. First, what are the sizes of over or understated pension liabilities relative to guideline benchmarks? Second, do debt market investors see through the potential management manipulation of pension discount rates? The authors find that firms with large understated pension liabilities face higher marginal borrowing costs after taking into account issue-specific features, firm characteristics, macroeconomic conditions and other pension information such as funded status and mandatory contributions.

The average understated projected benefit obligations (PBOs) are understated by $394.3 and $335.6, equivalent to 3.5 and 3.0% of the beginning of the fiscal year market value, respectively. The average understated accumulated benefit obligations (ABOs) are understated by $359.3 and $305.3 million, equivalent to 3.1 and 2.6%, of the beginning of the fiscal year market value, respectively. Relative to AA-grade corporate bond yields, the average difference between firm pension discount rates and benchmark yields becomes much smaller; the percentage of firm pension discount rates higher than benchmark yields is also much smaller. As a result, understated pension liabilities become negligible. The authors establish a robust relation between corporate bond yield spreads and measures of understated pension liabilities after controlling for issue-specific features, firm characteristics, other pension information (funded status and mandatory contributions), macroeconomic conditions, calendar effects and industry effects.

S&P Rating Services recognizes the issue that there is considerably more variability in discount rate assumptions among companies than in workforce demographics or the interest rate environment in which firms operate (Standard and Poor's, 2006). S&P also indicates that it would be desirable to normalize different discount rate assumptions but acknowledges that it is difficult to do so. In practice, S&P Rating Services conducts periodic surveys to see whether firms' assumed discount rates conform to the normal standard. The paper makes an initial attempt to quantify the size of understated pension liabilities and their impact on corporate bond yield spreads. This approach can be extended to study firms' costs of equity capital, the pricing of seasoned equity offerings and the pricing of merger and acquisition transaction deals, among other questions.

Although the pervasive influence of investor sentiment in equity markets is well documented, little is known about behavioral manifestations in bond markets. In this paper, we explore the impact of investor sentiment on corporate bond yield spreads. Our results reveal that bond yield spreads co‐vary with sentiment, and sentiment‐drivenmispricings and systematic reversal trends are very similar to those for stocks. Bonds appear underpriced (with high yields) during pessimistic periods and overpriced (with low yields) when optimism reigns. Consequent reversals result in predictable trends in post‐sentiment yield spreads.When beginning‐of‐period sentiment is low, subsequent yield spreads are low; high sentiment periods are followed by high spreads. High‐yield bonds (low ratings, Industrials and Utilities, extreme maturities or low durations, specially if low rated) demonstrate greater susceptibility to mispricings due to sentiment compared to low‐yield bonds. The incremental yield spread gap between highand low‐yield bonds converges subsequent to periods of low sentiment, and diverges after high sentiment. Equity attributes marginally influence the impact of sentiment on bond spreads, but mostly for distressed bonds only.

Recently the world economy was confronted to the worst financial crisis since the great depression. This unprecedented crisis started in mid-2007 had a huge impact on the European government bond market. But what are the main drivers of this “perfect storm” that since 2009 affects EU government bond market as well? To answer this question, we propose an empirical study of the determinants of the sovereign bond spreads of EU countries with respect to Germany during the period 2003–2010. Technically, we address two main questions. First, we ask what share of the change in sovereign bond spreads is explained by changes in the fundamentals, liquidity, and market risks. Second, we distinguish between EU member states within and outside the Euro area and question whether long-term determinants of spreads affect EU members uniformly. To these ends, we employ panel data techniques in a regression model where spreads to Germany (with virtually no default risk) are explained by set of traditional variables and a number of policy variables. Results reveal that large fiscal deficits and public debt as well as political risks and to a lesser extent the liquidity are likely to put substantial upward pressures on sovereign bond yields in many advanced European economies.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effects of liquidity on corporate bond spreads.

Using a systematic liquidity factor extracted from the yield spreads between on- and off-the-run Treasury issues as a state variable, the authors jointly estimate the default and liquidity spreads from corporate bond prices.

The authors find that the liquidity factor is strongly related to conventional liquidity measures such as bid-ask spread, volume, order imbalance, and depth. Empirical evidence shows that the liquidity component of corporate bond yield spreads is sizable and increases with maturity and credit risk. On average the liquidity spread accounts for about 25 percent of the spread for investment-grade bonds and one-third of the spread for speculative-grade bonds.

The results show that a significant part of corporate bond spreads are due to liquidity, which implies that it is not necessary for credit risk to explain the entire corporate bond spread.

The results show that returns from investments in corporate bonds represent compensations for bearing both credit and liquidity risks.

It is a novel approach to extract a liquidity factor from on- and off-the-run Treasury issues and use it to disentangle liquidity and credit spreads for corporate bonds.

This chapter presents evidence of persistence in pricing new corporate bond issues. Both transition matrix and regression analyses show that cross-sectional differences in the yields of initial public bond offerings across issuers persist over time, and the persistence effect is stronger for firms with no rating changes, less frequent bond issuance, and higher information asymmetry. Our findings support the hypothesis of the “ride on past” behavior and confirm the value of information production accumulated from the past bond issuances for the pricing of newly issued bonds.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of January sentiment on investors’ asset allocation decisions in the US corporate bond market during the rest of the year. Specifically, the study evaluates if the shift in January sentiment is a predictor of corporate bond spreads from February to December.

Using corporate bond trades reported in TRACE between 2005 and 2014, the authors examine the ability of the Index of Consumer Sentiment and the Index of Investor Sentiment to predict bond spreads over the 11 months following January. The study evaluates both the sign of the change in sentiment and the magnitude of the change in sentiment using two generalized linear models, controlling for industry, bond and firm fixed effects. Portfolios are analyzed based on yield, firm size and firm leverage. Additional analysis is performed to ensure results are robust to the impacts of the subprime financial crisis.

This paper finds that the changes in the sentiment measures in January predict bond spreads associated with bond trades in the subsequent 11 months, and this phenomenon, which the authors label as the “January sentiment effect,” has opposing impacts on risky and less risky bond portfolios.

This paper adds to the literature on the relationship between sentiment and investor’s allocation decisions. The evidence documented in this study is the first known to find that investors’ allocation decisions in a year are driven by their sentiment in January.

This paper investigates the effects of information asymmetry and Credit Rating Agency's reputation on bond yield spread, which is caused by the split bond rating of CRAs. For analysis, We do multivariate analysis, using bond rating and bond yield spread data in Korea from 2004 to 2015. The empirical results are as follows.

First, we examines whether information asymmetry affects the bond yield spread. using split rating data. As a result, the information asymmetry measured by split rating variable is significant, which supports the information asymmetry hypothesis. Additionally we can find bond yield spread is decided by negative credit grade rather than positive credit grade under split rating condition.

Next, we examines the relationship between the CRA’s reputation and the bond yield spread in case of split rating. Here, samples were divided into full samples and split rating samples. Summarizing the result, both samples are suggest similar result, the bond yield spread is changed depending on the specific CRA’s grading which having conservative rating tendency.

Thus, This result suggest information asymmetry caused by split rating and CRA’s reputation measured by CRA’s rating tendency affect bond yield spread in Korea