Search Options
Home Media Explainers Research & Publications Statistics Monetary Policy The €uro Payments & Markets Careers
Suggestions
Sort by

# Euro area spread divergence, risk premia and financial stability

Prepared by Nander de Vette and Benjamin Mosk[1]

Published as part of the Financial Stability Review, November 2022.

When financial fragmentation becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic, it can present a risk to financial stability.[2],[3] As long as market functioning is orderly, credit spreads reflect macroeconomic fundamentals and risks. However, history has shown that spread-widening dynamics can become self-reinforcing. In the euro area, such adverse market dynamics have often been termed “fragmentation”. This is often associated with impaired market liquidity conditions, ultimately resulting in impaired market functioning. In such conditions spread differences may start to diverge from fundamentals. However, differences in spreads alone do not necessarily point to fragmentation (Figure A).

A key feature of fragmentation is market segmentation, whereby some segments display divergent dynamics. In integrated and efficient markets, risk premia on similar assets, such as sovereign debt, tend to co-move to the extent that such movements are driven by common, systematic risk factors. By contrast, when markets are more fragmented, differences in risk premia can emerge beyond those that can be explained by an asset’s fundamentals and some market segments displaying divergent dynamics. This box constructs an indicator of such divergent dynamics for euro area bond markets, assesses the resilience of bond markets under different regimes for this indicator and discusses the financial stability risks associated with financial fragmentation.[4]

Euro area bond market dynamics in recent years can largely be explained by two factors, one which reflects common trends and another, secondary, factor which reflects divergences across countries. A statistical analysis of euro area bond yields finds that the two factors can explain most of their movements between 2006 and 2022. The first, and most important, factor reflects unfragmented dynamics whereby yields co-move across countries (Chart A, panel a). The second factor – a divergence factor – captures the segmentation of the bond markets in two distinct country blocks, with yields moving in opposite directions (Chart A, panel a). This finding is consistent with those of other studies that identify the factors that drive bond markets.[5] Flight-to-safety behaviour and elevated uncertainty may contribute to such divergent dynamics.[6]

In 2022, euro area bond markets have shown limited signs of the divergent dynamics that were prevalent during the euro area sovereign debt crisis. This can be seen from the divergent dynamics indicator (DDI), an indicator which reflects the fraction of weekly euro area bond yield movements that can be explained by the divergence factor. Considering longer-term trends, the DDI has declined gradually from the heights reached during the sovereign debt crisis in 2011, for both sovereign and corporate bonds. This may be related to ECB communications and the ECB’s public sector purchase programme. The divergence factor has almost always played a more important role for sovereign bonds than for corporate bonds (Chart A, panel b). This has also been the case more recently, with the bulk of euro area bond yield dynamics explained by the common factor. This indicates that sovereign and corporate spreads have generally been widening in a synchronous fashion, likely in reaction to euro area monetary policy normalisation. The introduction of the TPI, the flexibility in PEPP reinvestments, and the Next Generation EU package may have contributed to the relatively limited role played by the divergences in explaining recent bond market dynamics.

Bond markets seem to feature stronger amplification dynamics when divergences are elevated. Diverging bond market dynamics do not trivially imply that financial stability risks are elevated (Figure A). Empirical analysis, however, shows that elevated levels of the DDI are correlated with larger differences in market liquidity conditions. This points to pockets of reduced market liquidity (Chart A, panel b). There also appear to be stronger price spillovers between asset classes. When divergences are larger, both corporate bond and sovereign CDS spreads show higher sensitivity to equity price volatility (Chart B, panels a and b). The risks of disorderly and self-reinforcing dynamics might, therefore, be higher when divergences in market dynamics are more material. This could, in turn, feed back into sovereign risk pricing and drive a wedge between the yields of different countries.

All in all, risks to financial stability originating from euro area bond markets seem to be higher when divergent dynamics are more material. While spreads have widened over the course of 2022, euro area bond markets have largely shown unfragmented dynamics whereby yields have co-moved across countries (Chart A, panel b). However, this does not mean that divergent dynamics of the kind seen during the euro area sovereign debt crisis could not return, as in the past these dynamics emerged suddenly. Should that happen, market liquidity could dry up more easily in some sub-segments, making bond yields more vulnerable to adverse shocks, possibly exacerbating a tightening in financial conditions.

1. The authors would like to thank Luca Mingarelli for his valuable comments.

2. This box uses sovereign and corporate bond pricing to construct a statistical indicator that captures the dynamics driving credit spreads in sovereign and corporate bond markets. The box does not provide a quantitative indicator that is part of the Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI) activation assessment. A decision by the ECB’s Governing Council to activate the TPI will be based on a comprehensive assessment of market and transmission indicators, an evaluation of the eligibility criteria and a judgement that the activation of purchases under the TPI is in line with the achievement of the ECB’s primary objective. See the press release entitled “The Transmission Protection Instrument”, 21 July 2022.

3. We follow the definition of fragmentation as presented in the “FSB Report on Market Fragmentation”, Financial Stability Board, 4 June 2019. See Annex A of the FSB report for an overview of the literature on market fragmentation.

4. The analysis in this box is based on weekly data. Idiosyncratic changes in credit fundamentals would generally be expected to result in lower-frequency or longer-lasting yield changes. Therefore, country divergences of these relatively high-frequency movements could point to fragmentation.

5. Fabozzi, F. J., Giacometti, R. and Tsuchida, N., “Factor decomposition of the Eurozone sovereign CDS spreads”, Journal of International Money and Finance, Vol. 65, July 2016, pp. 1-23. The authors find similar dynamics and factors in their analysis of CDS spreads.

6. See Costantini, M. and Sousa, R. M., “What uncertainty does to euro area sovereign bond markets: Flight to safety and flight to quality”, Journal of International Money and Finance, Vol. 122, April 2022.