Financial crises and the transfer of risk between the private and public sectors: Evidence from European financial markets

The recent financial crisis in Europe has been especially interesting, since it started mainly as a private sector (banking) phenomenon but then evolved into a public (sovereign debt) crisis. Given that prices of a financial asset must reflect the risks associated to said asset, we expect the relationship between financial markets related to “private” and “public” assets to have changed fundamentally during the crisis: private markets should have led the incorporation of information during the early years of the crisis whereas the markets for government securities should have attained preeminence during the years of the sovereign debt crisis. We investigate this change in the leading role of information (risk) incorporation by looking at the relationships between the markets for sovereign CDSs, sovereign bonds and equity for thirteen European countries during the period 2008–2012. Our results suggest that during 2008–2009 equity markets led the process of incorporation of new information but during 2010 this leading role was assumed by sovereign CDS markets, thus suggesting a private-to-public risk transfer during the subprime crisis and a reversal to a public-to-private risk transfer during the sovereign debt crisis. In supplementary analyses we show, first, that the role of CDSs with respect to the other two markets is state dependent, i.e., sovereign CDSs play a stronger role in economies with higher perceived credit risk. Second, we perform a price discovery analysis between CDS markets of the different European countries, showing evidence that during the years 2007–2009 the Spanish CDSs led the price discovery process, while the Italian and French CDSs took over in 2011, results which are consistent with trading volume in the CDS markets.