The Influence of Implicit Guarantee on the Yield Spread of China’s Quasi-municipal Bond

Abstract

Local government debts are an important part of the bond market. This paper mainly investigates the risk that the implicit guarantee brings to the market of quasi-municipal bonds. The implicit guarantee comes from local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), which are the finance entities for the local government, issue quasi-municipal bonds. Because people are potentially thought these bonds are guaranteed by the local government, the funding cost of quasi-municipal bonds is lower than other bonds. However, some local government's ability to pay back the investors' money is weak which causes some high-rated quasi-municipal bonds to default and triggers many defaults, which, along with the local government's mounting debt, may make investors more concerned about its capacity to repay the loan in the event of default. Therefore, China's central government then issues some policies to reduce the effectiveness of implicit government guarantees, trying to make the quasi-municipal bonds turn to become more marketize and contain less guarantee. In this paper, the author initially tries to demonstrate that the implicit guarantee reduces the yield spread of quasi-municipal bonds. Then, the author argues that the issue of relevant policies lessens the implicit guarantee and increases the marketability of quasi-municipal corporate bonds. Lastly, the author tries to show that different administrative levels of LGFVs will affect the yield spread of the bond.