Public Debt & Sovereign Ratings - Do Industrialized Countries Enjoy a Privilege?

Bernhard Bartels and Constantin Weiser

VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the institutional investors' assessment of relative creditworthiness across selected country groups with a special focus on the impact of public debt on the perception of sovereign risk. Our results show that general government debt is among the most important determinants of credit risk in industrialized countries and emerging markets alike. When using a multivariate framework, we further find that the influence of debt on ratings does not differ between both groups. Also, our results point towards a rating penalty for highly-indebted advanced countries when their debt ratio is associated with a growing one. By contrast, a high debt level alone does not lead to an additional rating decline. Finally, we show that peripheral euro area economies (GIIPS) received a rating privilege before the financial crisis that turned into a penalty after 2008.

JEL-codes: E62 F34 G24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/112822/1/VfS_2015_pid_192.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc15:112822

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().