Central Counterparties and Liquidity Provision in Cash Markets

This paper investigates increased liquidity provision by market makers resulting from their ability to reduce balance sheet encumbrance through the use of central counterparties (CCPs). The introduction of the Basel III leverage rule constitutes a shock to market makers’ balance sheets and thus affects their capacity to intermediate trades. Using trade-by-trade data from sovereign bond markets, we show that liquidity provision by CCP members decreased to a lesser extent following the rule change. We attribute these findings to balance sheet reductions due to the netting enabled by CCPs, thereby highlighting their importance in cash markets.

Effective transfer entropy to measure information flows in credit markets

In this paper we propose to study the dynamics of financial contagion between the credit default swap (CDS) and the sovereign bond markets through effective transfer entropy, a model-free methodology which enables to overcome the required hypotheses of classical price discovery measures in the statistical and econometric literature, without being restricted to linear dynamics. By means of effective transfer entropy we correct for small sample biases which affect the traditional Shannon transfer entropy, as well as we are able to conduct inference on the estimated directional information flows. In our empirical application, we analyze the CDS and bond market data for eight countries of the European Union, and aim to discover which of the two assets is faster at incorporating the information on the credit risk of the underlying sovereign. Our results show a clear and statistically significant prominence of the bond market for pricing the sovereign credit risk, especially during the crisis period. During the post-crisis period, instead, a few countries behave dissimilarly from the others, in particular Spain and the Netherlands.

Impact of Coronavirus Pandemic on Financial Market Stability in Africa

The outbreak of the coronavirus in December 2019, with its accompanying declaration as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation in March 2020, resulted in lockdown of the global financial markets. This paper uses data from pre-coronavirus, coronavirus endemic and coronavirus pandemic periods to evaluate the impact of coronavirus pandemic on stability of Africa stock markets, sovereign bond markets and U.S. dollar exchange rates in Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa as well as Africa Sharia equity and Sukuk indices. Findings from study suggest that Africa financial markets became very unstable during the coronavirus pandemic than during the endemic and pre-coronavirus periods. Results from bivariate regression model show evidence of negative impact of coronavirus pandemic on financial market returns. The results further show that Africa financial markets return volatility increases as the number of coronavirus cases increases. Overall, the findings suggest that coronavirus has negative impact on financial markets’ returns and exacerbated financial markets instability thus retarding sustainable economic development in the continent.