The End of Market Discipline? Investor Expectations of Implicit Government Guarantees
58 Pages
Posted: 19 Nov 2011
Last revised: 12 Jun 2016
New York University - Leonard N. Stern School of Business; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); New York University (NYU) - Department of Finance
World Bank Research
Syracuse University - College of Law; Syracuse University - Whitman School of Management
Date Written: May 1, 2016
Abstract
Using unsecured bonds traded in the U.S. between 1990 and 2012, we find that bond credit spreads are sensitive to risk for most financial institutions, but not for the largest financial institutions. This “too big to fail” relation between firm size and the risk sensitivity of bond spreads is not seen in the non-financial sectors. The results are robust to using different measures of risk, controlling for bond liquidity, conducting an event study around shocks to investor expectations of government guarantees, examining explicitly and implicitly guaranteed bonds of the same firm, and using agency ratings of government support for financial institutions.
Keywords: Too big to fail, financial crisis, Dodd-Frank, bailout, implicit guarantee, moral hazard, systemic risk
JEL Classification: G21, G24, G28
Suggested Citation:
Suggested Citation
Acharya, Viral V. and Anginer, Deniz and Warburton, A. Joseph, The End of Market Discipline? Investor Expectations of Implicit Government Guarantees (May 1, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1961656 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1961656
