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. This paper examines equilibrium price relationships and price discovery between credit defaul swap (CDS), bond, and equity markets for emerging market sovereign issuers. Findings suggest that CDS and bond spreads converge despite various pressures that arise in the market. In most countries, however, we do not find any equilibrium price relationship between the bond and CDS markets and the equity markets. As for price discovery, our results are mixed. This stands in contrast to the empirical findings on corporate issuers in the United States and Europe.

No abstract

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. This paper describes a corporate sector vulnerability indicator, the expected number of defaults (END), based on the joint occurrence of defaults among a number of firms and/or institutions. The END indicator is general enough to assess systemic risk in the corporate and financial sectors, as well as systemic sovereign risk; and is also forward looking as it is constructed using information implied by financial securities prices. Using equity prices and balance-sheet data, we calculate the END to assess systemic risk in the corporate sector in Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand. We also discuss how the END systemic risk indicator overcomes some of the shortcomings of other vulnerability indicators.

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

In this article, we use the extreme value theory framework to analyse contagion risk across the international banking system. We test for the likelihood that an extreme shock affecting a major, systemic global bank would also affect another large local or foreign counterpart, and vice versa. Our results reveal several key trends among major global banks: contagion risk among banks exhibits 'home bias', individual banks are affected differently by idiosyncratic shocks to their major counterparts and banks are affected differently by common shocks to the real economy or financial markets. In general, bank soundness seems more susceptible to common (macro and market) shocks when the global environment is turbulent; this may have important implications for global financial stability especially during stressful periods. Not surprisingly, our findings also suggest that bank contagion risk has risen over time, which emphasizes the need for continuing collaboration on cross-border supervision and crisis management.