How Much of Bank Credit Risk Is Sovereign Risk? Evidence from Europe
91 Pages Posted: 16 Feb 2015 Last revised: 3 Jul 2017
There are 2 versions of this paper
How Much of Bank Credit Risk Is Sovereign Risk? Evidence from Europe
How Much of Bank Credit Risk is Sovereign Risk? Evidence from the Eurozone
Date Written: July 2, 2017
Abstract
We examine European banks' exposures to systematic and country-specific sovereign risk. We organize our investigation around a multifactor affine credit risk model estimated on CDS data of different maturities. During the 2008-2015 period, about one third of banks' credit risk is sovereign. However, banks strongly differ both in the magnitude and type of their sovereign exposures. Measures of indirect exposures, such as bank size and ROE, capture these cross-sectional differences better than measures of direct exposures. Furthermore, the properties of the distress risk premiums turn out to be important to understand the effect of sovereign risk on bank funding costs.
Keywords: Sovereign and bank credit risk; Credit default swaps; Distress risk premia; Bayesian estimation
JEL Classification: F34; G12; G15
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation