Emerging Bond Markets

The bond market is a key securities market and emerging economies present exciting, new investment opportunities. This timely book provides insights into these emerging bond markets through empirical models and analytical databases, i.e. Bloomberg, Eikon Refinitiv and the Russian Cbonds. The book looks at the dynamics of the development of emerging bond markets, their competitiveness, features and patterns using macro and micro level data. It also takes into consideration various securities type i.e. government, corporate, sub-federal and municipal bonds, to identify respective challenges and risks. The book also analyses factors that may inhibit or stimulate a well-balanced financial market. It includes case studies of Asian, Latin American and Russian bond markets, as also as cross-country comparisons. It will be a useful reference for anyone who is interested to learn more of the bond market and the modelling techniques for critical data analysis.

The bond market is a key securities market and emerging economies present exciting, new investment opportunities. This timely book provides insights into these emerging bond markets through empirical models and analytical databases, i.e. Bloomberg, Eikon Refinitiv and the Russian Cbonds. The book looks at the dynamics of the development of emerging bond markets, their competitiveness, features and patterns using macro and micro level data. It also takes into consideration various securities type i.e. government, corporate, sub-federal and municipal bonds, to identify respective challenges and risks. The book also analyses factors that may inhibit or stimulate a well-balanced financial market. It includes case studies of Asian, Latin American and Russian bond markets, as also as cross-country comparisons. It will be a useful reference for anyone who is interested to learn more of the bond market and the modelling techniques for critical data analysis.

Provides a detailed survey of a largely unexplored territory - the bond markets in the Dynamic Asian Economies of Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.

This paper estimates the impact of foreign participation in determining long-term local currency government bond yields and volatility in a group of emerging markets from 2000-2009. The results of a panel data analysis of 10 emerging markets show that greater foreign participation in the domestic government bond market tends to significantly reduce long-term government yields. Moreover, greater foreign participation does not necessarily result in increased volatility in bond yields in emerging markets and, in fact, could even dampen volatility in some instances.

Foreign holdings of emerging markets (EMs) government bonds have increased substantially over the last decade. While foreign participation in local-currency sovereign bond markets provides an additional source of financing and reduces sovereign yields, it raises concerns about increased sensitivity of yields to shifts in market sentiment. The analysis in this paper suggests that foreign participation and an undiversified investor base transmit global financial shocks to local-currency sovereign bond markets by increasing yield volatility and, beyond a certain threshold, amplify these spillovers. These estimates are robust to a range of econometric techniques including panel smooth threshold regression.

Unconstrained multi-sector bond funds (MSBFs) can be a source of spillovers to emerging markets and potentially exert a sizable impact on cross-border flows. MSBFs have grown their investment in emerging markets in recent years and are highly concentrated—both in their positions and their decision-making. They typically also exhibit opportunistic behavior much more so than other investment funds. Theoretically, their size, multisector mandate, and unconstrained nature allows MSBFs to be a source of financial stability in periods of wide-spread market turmoil while others sell at fire-sale prices. However, this note, building on the analysis of Cortes and Sanfilippo (2020) and incorporating data around the COVID-19 crisis, finds that MSBFs could have contributed to increase market stress in selected emerging markets. When faced with large investor redemptions during the crisis, our sample of MSBFs chose to rebalance their portfolios in a concentrated manner, raising a large proportion of cash in a few specific local currency bond markets. This may have contributed to exacerbating the relative underperformance of these local currency bond markets to broader emerging market indices.

While many studies have looked into the determinants of yields on externally issued sovereign bonds of emerging economies, analysis of domestically issued bonds has hitherto been limited, despite their growing relevance. This paper finds that the extent to which fiscal variables affect domestic bond yields in emerging economies depends on the level of global risk aversion. During tranquil times in global markets, fiscal variables do not seem to be a significant determinant of domestic bond yields in emerging economies. However, when market participants are on edge, they pay greater attention to country-specific fiscal fundamentals, revealing greater alertness about default risk.

This paper analyzes the price stabilizing properties of puttable and extendible bonds, their potential to help develop interest-rate derivative markets, and their use by governments. Their stabilizing properties imply that, when bond prices fall, prices for puttable and extendible bonds fall by less. Their embedded options work as a cushion and replicate the trading gains from hedging long-term bonds with interest rate derivatives. These bonds can help develop interest-rate derivative markets in developing countries and eventually increase demand for long-term government bonds. Informal evidence from OECD countries suggests that these bonds were useful in the 1980s, when interest rates were volatile.