IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/quaeco/v48y2008i4p691-707.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Risk taking by Japanese bond investors: Testing the "reach for yields" hypothesis in the Japanese bond markets

Author

Listed:
  • Nishioka, Shinichi
  • Baba, Naohiko

Abstract

This paper attempts to test the "reach for yields" hypothesis in the Japanese bond markets to explore the cause of extremely low credit spreads on Japanese bonds, especially BBB-rated bonds, using a three-factor CAPM ([gamma]-CAPM) with (co)skewness as an additional market risk factor. Under the [gamma]-CAPM, risk premium can be expressed as a weighted average of [beta]-risk and [gamma]-risk. Empirical results support the [gamma]-CAPM against the [beta]-CAPM. The estimated weight of [gamma]-risk is 2.6 percent in Japan, compared with 12.5 percent in the United States. This difference mainly reflects a lower degree of relative risk aversion in Japan.

Suggested Citation

  • Nishioka, Shinichi & Baba, Naohiko, 2008. "Risk taking by Japanese bond investors: Testing the "reach for yields" hypothesis in the Japanese bond markets," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 48(4), pages 691-707, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:quaeco:v:48:y:2008:i:4:p:691-707
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062-9769(07)00110-X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hansen, Lars Peter, 1982. "Large Sample Properties of Generalized Method of Moments Estimators," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(4), pages 1029-1054, July.
    2. Ilmanen, Antti, 1995. "Time-Varying Expected Returns in International Bond Markets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 50(2), pages 481-506, June.
    3. Baba, Naohiko & Nishioka, Shinichi & Oda, Nobuyuki & Shirakawa, Masaaki & Ueda, Kazuo & Ugai, Hiroshi, 2005. "Japan's Deflation, Problems in the Financial System, and Monetary Policy," Monetary and Economic Studies, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan, vol. 23(1), pages 47-111, February.
    4. Duffie, Darrell & Singleton, Kenneth J, 1999. "Modeling Term Structures of Defaultable Bonds," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 12(4), pages 687-720.
    5. Robert A. Jarrow & David Lando & Stuart M. Turnbull, 2008. "A Markov Model for the Term Structure of Credit Risk Spreads," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Financial Derivatives Pricing Selected Works of Robert Jarrow, chapter 18, pages 411-453, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    6. Merton, Robert C, 1974. "On the Pricing of Corporate Debt: The Risk Structure of Interest Rates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 29(2), pages 449-470, May.
    7. Paul A. Samuelson, 1970. "The Fundamental Approximation Theorem of Portfolio Analysis in terms of Means, Variances and Higher Moments," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 37(4), pages 537-542.
    8. de Athayde, Gustavo M. & Flores, Renato Jr., 2004. "Finding a maximum skewness portfolio--a general solution to three-moments portfolio choice," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 28(7), pages 1335-1352, April.
    9. Paul R. Krugman, 1998. "It's Baaack: Japan's Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 29(2), pages 137-206.
    10. Hwang, Soosung & Satchell, Stephen E, 1999. "Modelling Emerging Market Risk Premia Using Higher Moments," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 4(4), pages 271-296, October.
    11. King, Tao-Hsien Dolly & Khang, Kenneth, 2005. "On the importance of systematic risk factors in explaining the cross-section of corporate bond yield spreads," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 29(12), pages 3141-3158, December.
    12. Jeffery D Amato & Eli M Remolona, 2003. "The credit spread puzzle," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, December.
    13. Lim, Kian-Guan, 1989. "A New Test of the Three-Moment Capital Asset Pricing Model," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 24(2), pages 205-216, June.
    14. Edwin J. Elton & Martin J. Gruber & Deepak Agrawal & Christopher Mann, 2001. "Explaining the Rate Spread on Corporate Bonds," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(1), pages 247-277, February.
    15. William F. Sharpe, 1964. "Capital Asset Prices: A Theory Of Market Equilibrium Under Conditions Of Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 19(3), pages 425-442, September.
    16. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    17. Black, Fischer & Scholes, Myron S, 1973. "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 637-654, May-June.
    18. Campbell R. Harvey & Akhtar Siddique, 2000. "Conditional Skewness in Asset Pricing Tests," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 55(3), pages 1263-1295, June.
    19. Kraus, Alan & Litzenberger, Robert H, 1976. "Skewness Preference and the Valuation of Risk Assets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 31(4), pages 1085-1100, September.
    20. Black, Fischer, 1972. "Capital Market Equilibrium with Restricted Borrowing," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 45(3), pages 444-455, July.
    21. Pierre Collin-Dufresn & Robert S. Goldstein & J. Spencer Martin, 2001. "The Determinants of Credit Spread Changes," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(6), pages 2177-2207, December.
    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. Azad, A.S.M. Sohel & Fang, Victor & Hung, Chi-Hsiou, 2012. "Linking the interest rate swap markets to the macroeconomic risk: The UK and us evidence," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 22(C), pages 38-47.

    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. Andreas Blöchlinger, 2018. "Credit Rating and Pricing: Poles Apart," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 11(2), pages 1-26, May.
    2. Shinichi Nishioka & Naohiko Baba, 2004. "Credit Risk Taking by Japanese Investors: Is Skewness Risk Priced in Japanese Corporate Bond Market?," Bank of Japan Working Paper Series 04-E-7, Bank of Japan.
    3. Paul Schneider & Christian Wagner & Josef Zechner, 2020. "Low‐Risk Anomalies?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 75(5), pages 2673-2718, October.
    4. Stephanie Heck, 2022. "Corporate bond yields and returns: a survey," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 36(2), pages 179-201, June.
    5. Murphy, Austin & Headley, Adrian, 2022. "An empirical evaluation of alternative fundamental models of credit spreads," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    6. Giesecke, Kay & Longstaff, Francis A. & Schaefer, Stephen & Strebulaev, Ilya, 2011. "Corporate bond default risk: A 150-year perspective," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(2), pages 233-250.
    7. Malevergne, Y. & Sornette, D., 2007. "Self-consistent asset pricing models," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 382(1), pages 149-171.
    8. Cao, N. & Galvani, V. & Gubellini, S., 2017. "Firm-specific stock and bond predictability: New evidence from Canada," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 174-192.
    9. repec:wyi:journl:002109 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Antonio Trujillo-Ponce & Reyes Samaniego-Medina & Clara Cardone-Riportella, 2014. "Examining what best explains corporate credit risk: accounting-based versus market-based models," Journal of Business Economics and Management, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(2), pages 253-276, April.
    11. Mr. Marcel Peter & Martín Grandes, 2005. "How Important Is Sovereign Risk in Determining Corporate Default Premia? The Case of South Africa," IMF Working Papers 2005/217, International Monetary Fund.
    12. Alain Monfort & Jean-Paul Renne, 2013. "Default, Liquidity, and Crises: an Econometric Framework," Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(2), pages 221-262, March.
    13. François-Éric Racicot & Raymond Théoret, 2009. "Integrating volatility factors in the analysis of the hedge fund alpha puzzle," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 37-62, April.
    14. Guo, Liang, 2013. "Determinants of credit spreads: The role of ambiguity and information uncertainty," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 279-297.
    15. Samir Kadiric & Arthur Korus, 2019. "The effects of Brexit on credit spreads: Evidence from UK and Eurozone corporate bond markets," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 16(1), pages 65-102, March.
    16. Ming Fang & Rui Zhong, 2004. "Default Risk, Firm's Characteristics, and Risk Shifting," Yale School of Management Working Papers amz2461, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Mar 2005.
    17. Xu, Zhongxiang & Li, Xiafei & Chevapatrakul, Thanaset & Gao, Ning, 2022. "Default risk, macroeconomic conditions, and the market skewness risk premium," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    18. Bada, Oualid & Kneip, Alois, 2010. "Panel Data Models with Unobserved Multiple Time- Varying Effects to Estimate Risk Premium of Corporate Bonds," MPRA Paper 26006, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Bhanu Pratap Singh Thakur & M. Kannadhasan & Vinay Goyal, 2018. "Determinants of corporate credit spread: evidence from India," DECISION: Official Journal of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Springer;Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, vol. 45(1), pages 59-73, March.
    20. Kay Giesecke & Francis A. Longstaff & Stephen Schaefer & Ilya Strebulaev, 2010. "Corporate Bond Default Risk: A 150-Year Perspective," NBER Working Papers 15848, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    21. Nikolas Rokkanen, 2009. "Lemmings in the bond market? An empirical analysis of the term structure of credit spreads," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 23(1), pages 31-57, March.

    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:eee:quaeco:v:48:y:2008:i:4:p:691-707. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620167 .

    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.