This paper explores how global financial conditions influence corporate leverage growth in emerging markets (EMs). Using a sample of 800,000 listed and non-listed firms across 28 EMs, we find that accommodative global financial conditions—initially proxied with a measure of U.S. monetary policy—are associated with faster leverage growth. The impact is more pronounced for financially constrained firms, such as small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and for EMs whose domestic monetary policy is more aligned with that of the United States. The findings suggest that global financial conditions affect EM firms' leverage growth by influencing domestic interest rates and by relaxing corporate borrowing constraints. Finally, leverage increases disproportionately more for firms that are either relatively less profitable or less solvent when global financial conditions become looser.

We investigate the interdependence of the default risk of several Eurozone countries (France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain) and their domestic banks during the period between June 2007 and May 2010, using daily credit default swaps (CDS). Bank bailout programs changed the composition of both banks’ and sovereign balance sheets and, moreover, affected the linkage between the default risk of governments and their local banks. Our main findings suggest that in the period before bank bailouts the contagion disperses from bank credit spreads into the sovereign CDS market. After bailouts, a financial sector shock affects sovereign CDS spreads more strongly in the short run. However, the impact becomes insignificant in the long term. Furthermore, government CDS spreads become an important determinant of banks’ CDS series. The interdependence of government and bank credit risk is heterogeneous across countries, but homogeneous within the same country.

In this paper we modify and extend the framework of Diebold and Yilmaz (2011) to quantify spillovers between sovereign credit markets and banks in the euro area. Spillovers are estimated recursively from a vector autoregressive model of daily changes in credit default swap (CDS) spreads with exogenous common factors. We account for interdependencies between sovereign and bank CDS spreads and derive generalized impulse response functions. Specifically, we assess the systemic effect of an unexpected shock to the creditworthiness of a sovereign or country-specific bank index on other sovereigns and bank CDSs between October 2009 and July 2012. Channels of shock transmission from or to sovereigns and banks are summarized in a Contagion Index and its four components: (i) among sovereigns, (ii) among banks, (iii) from sovereigns to banks, and (iv) from banks to sovereigns. We also highlight the impact of policy-related events on the Contagion Index.