IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bap/journl/180101.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Dependence of Structural Breaks in Rating Transition Dynamics on Economic and Market Variations

Author

Listed:
  • Haipeng Xing

    (Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, SUNY at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794, U.S.A.)

  • Ying Chen

    (Everspring Capital LLC., 350 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022, U.S.A.)

Abstract

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 has caused severe economic and political consequences over the world. An interesting question from this crisis is whether or to what extent such sharp changes or structural breaks in the market can be explained by economic and market fundamentals. To address this issue, we consider a model that extracts the information of market structural breaks from firms¡¯ credit rating records, and connects probabilities of market structural breaks to observed and latent economic variables. We also discuss the issue of selecting significant variables when the number of economic covariates is large. We then analyze market structural breaks that involve U.S. firms¡¯ credit rating records and historical data of economic and market fundamentals from 1986 to 2015. We find that the probabilities of structural breaks are positively correlated with changes of S&P500 returns and volatilities and changes of inflation, and negatively correlated with changes of corporate bond yield. The significance of other variables depends on the inclusion of latent variables in the study or not.

Suggested Citation

  • Haipeng Xing & Ying Chen, 2018. "Dependence of Structural Breaks in Rating Transition Dynamics on Economic and Market Variations," Review of Economics & Finance, Better Advances Press, Canada, vol. 11, pages 1-18, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:bap:journl:180101
    Note: The research of the first author is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation DMS- 1206321 and DMS-1612501. We thank two anonymous referees for their comments to improve the paper. We also thank our research assistant, Danqing Li, for helping us code the algorithm in Section 4.1.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.bapress.ca/ref/ref-article/1923-7529-2018-01-01-18.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Darrell Duffie & Andreas Eckner & Guillaume Horel & Leandro Saita, 2009. "Frailty Correlated Default," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 64(5), pages 2089-2123, October.
    2. Koopman, Siem Jan & Kräussl, Roman & Lucas, André & Monteiro, André B., 2009. "Credit cycles and macro fundamentals," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 42-54, January.
    3. Nickell, Pamela & Perraudin, William & Varotto, Simone, 2000. "Stability of rating transitions," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 24(1-2), pages 203-227, January.
    4. Malcolm Baker & Jeffrey Wurgler, 2006. "Investor Sentiment and the Cross‐Section of Stock Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(4), pages 1645-1680, August.
    5. Skreta, Vasiliki & Veldkamp, Laura, 2009. "Ratings shopping and asset complexity: A theory of ratings inflation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(5), pages 678-695, July.
    6. Woodford, Michael, 1990. "Public Debt as Private Liquidity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(2), pages 382-388, May.
    7. Bangia, Anil & Diebold, Francis X. & Kronimus, Andre & Schagen, Christian & Schuermann, Til, 2002. "Ratings migration and the business cycle, with application to credit portfolio stress testing," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 26(2-3), pages 445-474, March.
    8. Yan, Alice Xie & Shi, Jian & Wu, Chunchi, 2008. "Do macroeconomic variables matter for pricing default risk?," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(2), pages 279-291.
    9. Paul Povel & Rajdeep Singh & Andrew Winton, 2007. "Booms, Busts, and Fraud," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(4), pages 1219-1254.
    10. Mathis, Jérôme & McAndrews, James & Rochet, Jean-Charles, 2009. "Rating the raters: Are reputation concerns powerful enough to discipline rating agencies?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(5), pages 657-674, July.
    11. Carling, Kenneth & Jacobson, Tor & Linde, Jesper & Roszbach, Kasper, 2007. "Corporate credit risk modeling and the macroeconomy," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 845-868, March.
    12. Bruce E. Hansen, 2001. "The New Econometrics of Structural Change: Dating Breaks in U.S. Labour Productivity," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 15(4), pages 117-128, Fall.
    13. Xing, Haipeng & Sun, Ning & Chen, Ying, 2012. "Credit rating dynamics in the presence of unknown structural breaks," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 78-89.
    14. Mariano, Beatriz, 2012. "Market power and reputational concerns in the ratings industry," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(6), pages 1616-1626.
    15. Figlewski, Stephen & Frydman, Halina & Liang, Weijian, 2012. "Modeling the effect of macroeconomic factors on corporate default and credit rating transitions," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 87-105.
    16. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Addendum: Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(5), pages 768-768, November.
    17. Opp, Christian C. & Opp, Marcus M. & Harris, Milton, 2013. "Rating agencies in the face of regulation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(1), pages 46-61.
    18. Friedman, Benjamin M & Kuttner, Kenneth N, 1992. "Money, Income, Prices, and Interest Rates," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(3), pages 472-492, June.
    19. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(2), pages 301-320, April.
    20. Gertler, Mark & Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro & Queralto, Albert, 2012. "Financial crises, bank risk exposure and government financial policy," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(S), pages 17-34.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Haipeng Xing & Yang Yu, 2018. "Firm’s Credit Risk in the Presence of Market Structural Breaks," Risks, MDPI, vol. 6(4), pages 1-16, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Figlewski, Stephen & Frydman, Halina & Liang, Weijian, 2012. "Modeling the effect of macroeconomic factors on corporate default and credit rating transitions," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 87-105.
    2. Miroslav Plasil & Tomas Konecny & Jakub Seidler & Petr Hlavac, 2015. "In the Quest of Measuring the Financial Cycle," Working Papers 2015/05, Czech National Bank.
    3. Edirisinghe, Chanaka & Sawicki, Julia & Zhao, Yonggan & Zhou, Jun, 2022. "Predicting credit rating changes conditional on economic strength," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 47(PB).
    4. Bar-Isaac, Heski & Shapiro, Joel, 2013. "Ratings quality over the business cycle," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(1), pages 62-78.
    5. Ozerturk, Saltuk, 2014. "Ratings as regulatory stamps," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 17-29.
    6. Jones, Stewart & Johnstone, David & Wilson, Roy, 2015. "An empirical evaluation of the performance of binary classifiers in the prediction of credit ratings changes," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 72-85.
    7. Nelson Camanho & Pragyan Deb & Zijun Liu, 2022. "Credit rating and competition," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(3), pages 2873-2897, July.
    8. Zhang, Xuan & Ouyang, Ruolan & Liu, Ding & Xu, Liao, 2020. "Determinants of corporate default risk in China: The role of financial constraints," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 87-98.
    9. Jeon, Doh-Shin & Lovo, Stefano, 2013. "Credit rating industry: A helicopter tour of stylized facts and recent theories," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 643-651.
    10. Panagiotis K. Staikouras, 2012. "A Theoretical and Empirical Review of the EU Regulation on Credit Rating Agencies: In Search of Truth, Not Scapegoats," Financial Markets, Institutions & Instruments, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 21(2), pages 71-155, May.
    11. Figueroa, Nicolás & Leukhina, Oksana & Ramírez, Carlos, 2021. "Imperfect information transmission from banks to investors: Macroeconomic implications," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 87-98.
    12. Hirth, Stefan, 2014. "Credit rating dynamics and competition," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 100-112.
    13. Stefan Kerbl & Michael Sigmund, 2011. "What Drives Aggregate Credit Risk?," Financial Stability Report, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank), issue 22, pages 72-87.
    14. Loerke, Petra & Niedermayer, Andras, 2018. "On the effect of aggregate uncertainty on certification intermediaries’ incentives to distort ratings," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 20-48.
    15. Chen, Zhongfei & Matousek, Roman & Stewart, Chris & Webb, Rob, 2019. "Do rating agencies exhibit herding behaviour? Evidence from sovereign ratings," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 57-70.
    16. Fischer, Thomas, 2015. "Market structure and rating strategies in credit rating markets – A dynamic model with matching of heterogeneous bond issuers and rating agencies," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 39-56.
    17. José Jorge, 2016. "Sovereign Ratings and Investor Behavior," CEF.UP Working Papers 1601, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto.
    18. Zhang, Xuan & Zhao, Yang & Yao, Xiao, 2022. "Forecasting corporate default risk in China," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 1054-1070.
    19. Yao, Zhiyong & Gu, Dingwei & Chen, Yongmin, 2017. "Rating deflation versus inflation: On procyclical credit ratings," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 46-64.
    20. Kempf, Elisabeth, 2017. "The Job Rating Game: The Effects of Revolving Doors on Analyst Incentives," Working Papers 258, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Credit rating; Markov chain Monte Carlos; Stochastic approximation; Structural break; Variable selection;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C13 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Estimation: General
    • C41 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Duration Analysis; Optimal Timing Strategies
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bap:journl:180101. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Carlson (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.bapress.ca .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.