Analyzing Credit Risk Transmission to the Non-Financial Sector in Europe: A Network Approach

A high-dimensional network of European CDS spreads is modeled to assess the transmission of credit risk to the non-financial corporate sector in Europe. We build on a network connectedness approach that uses variance decompositions in vector autoregressions (VARs) to characterize the dependence structure in the panel of CDS spreads. Our main findings suggest a sectoral clustering in the CDS network, where financial institutions are located in the center of the network and non-financial as well as sovereign CDS are grouped around the financial center. We find that financial and sovereign risk are important drivers of corporate credit risk, particularly during crisis events. We identify an increase in the transmission of financial and sovereign credit risk to the non-financial sector during the Global Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis. By contrast, we find that the transmission of risk within the non-financial sector remains unaffected by crises.

Agricultural Commodity Markets

The Chair of Monetary Economics has recently started to focus on price dynamics in agricultural markets. The chair publishes and holds talks to empirical results concerning speculative bubbles, price discovery and the relevance of financial investors in agricultural commodity markets. International cooperations are used to investigate markets that have been neglected in scientific studies, such as European, Brazilian and New Zealand futures markets. Although these markets are relatively young, their importance for producers, processors and financial investors is growing. The specific characteristics of the price dynamics in particular challenge the application of empirical methods. A further core of the research is the transfer of the empirical results to practical use.