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This Policy Discussion Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Policy Discussion Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Policy Discussion Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. Recent years have witnessed a surge in the issuance of Islamic capital market securities (sukuk) by corporates and public sector entities amid growing demand for alternative investments. As the sukuk market continues to develop, new challenges and opportunities for sovereign debt managers and capital market development arise. This paper reviews the key developments in the sukuk market and informs the debate about challenges and opportunities going forward.

Crises on external sovereign debt are typically defined as defaults. Such a definition adequately captures debt-servicing difficulties in the 1980s, a period of numerous defaults on bank loans. However, defining defaults as debt crises is problematic for the 1990s, when sovereign bond markets emerged. Not only were there very few defaults in the 1990s, but liquidity indicators do not play any role in explaining defaults in this period. In order to overcome the resulting dearth of data on defaults and capture the evolution of debt markets in the 1990s, we define debt crises as events occurring when either a country defaults or its bond spreads are above a critical threshold. We find that, when information from bond markets is included, standard indicators—solvency and liquidity measures, as well as macroeconomic control variables—are significant. IMF Staff Papers (2007) 54, 306–337. doi:10.1057/palgrave.imfsp.9450010

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We study how investors account for the riskiness of banks' risk-weighted assets (RWA) by examining the determinants of stock returns and market measures of risk. We find that banks with lower RWA performed better during the US and European crises. This relationship is weaker in Europe where banks can use Basel II internal risk models. For large banks, investors paid less attention to RWA and rewarded instead lower wholesale funding and better asset quality. RWA do not, in general, predict market measures of risk although there is evidence of a positive relationship before the US crisis which becomes negative afterwards. JEL Classification Numbers: G20, G21, G28

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This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF.The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate.In contrast to corporate defaults, regulators typically take a number of statutory actions to avoid the large fiscal costs associated with bank defaults. The distance-to-default, a widely used market-based measure of corporate default risk, ignores such regulatory actions. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces the concept of distance-to-capital that accounts for pre-default regulatory actions such as those in a prompt-corrective-actions framework. We show that both risk measures can be analyzed using the same theoretical framework but differ depending on the level of capital adequacy thresholds and asset volatility. We also use the framework to illustrate pre-default regulatory actions in Japan in 2001-03. JEL Classification Numbers: G12, G21