A top-down analysis approach used for over 17 thousand of euro-denominated corporate bond issuances executed in the European primary bond market between 1999 and 2013. The main findings reveal not only the most active corporate issuers in Europe, but they also show the decomposition of issuance by coupon type, rated versus unrated issuance, debut and perpetual issuances, high grade as well as high yield new bond issues split by sector, rating and maturity. I used the opensource statistical package Gretl and applied the ordinary least square technique in order to quantify the association between euro-denominated corporate issuance and credit spreads.

This thesis investigates the robustness and stability of total return series for credit bond index investments. Dueto the challenges which arise for financial institutes and investors in achieving these objectives, we aim to createa forecasting model which matches the statistical properties of historical data, while remaining robust, stable andeasy to calibrate. To reach this goal, we implement autoregressive time-series models for credit spreads, a Vasicekmodel for the interest rate and use transformations to create total return series. We find that our autoregressivemodel performs well in terms of robustness and stability, while being statistically accurate for the Investment GradeIndex. The High Yield model has good statistical accuracy, but is lacking in stability and robustness. / Denna avhandling undersöker robustheten och stabiliteten hos totalavkastningsserier för investeringar ikreditobligationsindex. På grund av de utmaningar som uppstår för finansiella institut och investerare i att uppnådessa mål, syftar vi till att skapa en prognosmodell som matchar de statistiska egenskaperna hos historiska datasamtidigt som den förblir robust, stabil och enkel att kalibrera. För att nå detta mål implementerar vi autoregressivatidsserie-modeller för kreditspridningar, en Vasicek-modell för räntan och använder transformationer för att skapatotalavkastningsserier. Vi finner att vår autoregressiva modell för Investment Grade Indexet presterar bra gällanderobusthet och stabilitet samtidigt som den är statistiskt korrekt. High Yield modellen är statistiskt korrekt, men ärmindre bra gällande stabilitet och robusthet.

Submitted by Giovanni Tondin Merlin (gtmerlin@hotmail.com) on 2014-03-10T16:45:40Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Spreads e Informalidade - Giovanni Merlin.pdf: 943568 bytes, checksum: 8fcba4354e975daa8939d6a2913f4c16 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Suzinei Teles Garcia Garcia (suzinei.garcia@fgv.br) on 2014-03-10T20:25:41Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Spreads e Informalidade - Giovanni Merlin.pdf: 943568 bytes, checksum: 8fcba4354e975daa8939d6a2913f4c16 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-03-10T21:18:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Spreads e Informalidade - Giovanni Merlin.pdf: 943568 bytes, checksum: 8fcba4354e975daa8939d6a2913f4c16 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-21 / Este trabalho busca identificar os efeitos de mudanças nos spreads bancários sobre as distribuições de renda, riqueza e consumo, bem como o bem-estar da economia. Para tal, é desenvolvido um modelo de agentes heterogêneos com mercados incompletos e escolha ocupacional, no qual a informalidade de firmas e trabalhadores é um canal de transmissão relevante. O principal resultado encontrado é que reduções no spread para pessoa jurídica aumenta a proporção de empreendedores e trabalhadores formais na economia, de forma que o tamanho do setor informal diminui. Os efeitos sobre a desigualdade, no entanto, são ambíguos, e dependerão da dinâmica salarial e das transferências do governo. Reduções no spread para pessoa física levam a uma redução nos indicadores de desigualdade, em detrimento do consumo e bem-estar agregados. Calibrando o modelo para o Brasil para 2003-2012, é possível encontrar resultados em linha com a recente queda na informalidade e no diferencial salarial entre trabalhadores formais e informais. / This work looks to identify the effects of changes in banking spreads on income, wealth and consumption distributions, as well as welfare. For this purpose, a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-market model with occupational choice is developed, in which the informality, of firms and workers, is a relevant transmission channel. The main result found is that reductions on spreads for firms leads to a higher share of formal workers and entrepreneurs in the economy, reducing the size of the informal sector. The effect on inequality, however, are ambiguous, and depends on wages dynamics and government transfers. Cuts in spreads to individuals reduce inequality indicators, at the expense of consumption and aggregate welfare. Calibrating the model for Brazil, from 2003 to 2012, is possible to find results in line with the recent fall in informality and wage gap between formal and informal workers.

This thesis presents an application of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Hierarchical PCA to credit spreads. The aim is to identify the underlying factors that drive the behavior of credit spreads as well as the left over idiosyncratic risk, which is crucial for risk management and pricing of credit derivatives. The study employs a dataset from the Swedish market of credit spreads for different maturities and ratings, split into Covered Bonds and Corporate Bonds, and performs PCA to extract the dominant factors that explain the variation in the data of the former set. The results show that most of the systemic movements in Swedish covered bonds can be extracted using a mean which coincides with the first principal component. The report further explores the idiosyncratic risk of the credit spreads to further the knowledge regarding the dynamics of credit spreads and improving risk management in credit portfolios, specifically in regards to new regulation in the form of the Fundemental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB). The thesis also explores a more general model on corporate bonds using HPCA and K-means clustering. Due to data issues it is less explored but there are useful findings, specifically regarding the feasibility of using clustering in combination with HPCA. / I detta arbete presenteras en tillämpning av Principal Komponent Analysis (PCA) och Hierarkisk PCA på kreditspreadar. Syftet är att identifiera de underliggande faktorer som styr kreditspreadarnas beteende samt den kvarvarande idiosynkratiska risken, vilket är avgörande för riskhantering och prissättning av diverse kreditderivat. I studien används en datamängd från den svenska marknaden med kreditspreadar för olika löptider och kreditbetyg, uppdelat på säkerställda obligationer och företagsobligationer, och PCA används för att ta fram de mest signifikanta faktorerna som förklarar variationen i data för de förstnämnda obligationerna. Resultaten visar att de flesta av de systematiska rörelserna i svenska säkerställda obligationer kan extraheras med hjälp av ett medelvärde som sammanfaller med den första principalkomponenten. I rapporten undersöks vidare den idiosynkratiska risken i kreditspreadarna för att öka kunskapen om dynamiken i kreditspreadarna och förbättre riskhanteringen i kreditportföljer, särskilt med tanke på regelverket "Fundemental Review of the Tradring book" (FRTB). I rapporten undersöktes vidare en mer allmän modell för företagsobligationer med hjälp av HPCA och K-means-klustering. På grund av dataproblem är den mindre utforstkad, men det finns användbara resultat, särskild när det gäller möjligheten att använda kluster i kombination med HPCA.