How Much of Bank Credit Risk Is Sovereign Risk? Evidence from Europe

We examine European banks' exposures to systematic and country-specific sovereign risk. We organize our investigation around a multifactor affine credit risk model estimated on credit default swap data of different maturities. During the 2008-15 period, about one third of banks' credit risk is sovereign. However, banks strongly differ both in the magnitude and type of their sovereign exposures. Measures of indirect exposures, such as bank size and return on equity, capture these cross-sectional differences better than measures of direct exposures. Furthermore, the properties of the distress risk premiums turn out to be important to understand the effect of sovereign risk on bank funding costs.