Euro at Risk: The Impact of Member Countries Credit Risk on the Stability of the Common Currency

Thorsten Lehnert, Lamia Bekkour, Xisong Jin (), Fanou Rasmouki and Christian Wolff

LSF Research Working Paper Series from Luxembourg School of Finance, University of Luxembourg

Abstract: In this paper, we empirically investigate the impact of the credit risk of Eurozone member countries on the stability of the Euro. In practice, in the absence of eurobonds, euro-area credit risk is induced though the credit default swaps of the member countries. The stability of the euro is examined by decomposing dollareuro exchange rate options into the moments of the risk-neutral distribution. We document that during the sovereign debt crisis changes in the creditworthiness of member countries have significant impact on the stability of the euro. In particular, an increase in member countries credit risk results in an increase of volatility of the dollar-euro exchange rate along with soaring tail risk induced through the riskneutral kurtosis. We find that member countries credit risk is a major determinant of the euro crash risk as measured by the risk-neutral skewness. We propose a new indicator for currency stability by combining the risk-neutral moments into an aggregated risk measure and show that our results are robust to this change in measure. Noticeable is the fact that during the sovereign debt crisis, the creditworthiness of countries with vulnerable fiscal positions is the main riskendangering factor of the euro-stability.

Keywords: European sovereign debt crisis; currency options; credit default swaps; currency stability; risk-neutral distribution; crash risk; tail risk. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F31 G13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mon and nep-rmg
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Euro at risk: The impact of member countries' credit risk on the stability of the common currency (2015)
Working Paper: Euro at Risk: The Impact of Member Countries? Credit Risk on the Stability of the Common Currency (2012)
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