Distributional Linkages between European Sovereign Bond and Bank Asset Returns

We analyse the dependence between sovereign bonds’ and banks’ asset return distributions with a large panel of European data from 2001 to 2013. Using quantile regressions, we identify nonlinear contemporaneous and lagged dependence. As a result, shocks to crisis-hit sovereign bonds have contemporaneous effects on the whole distribution of banks’ returns, as well as a persistent impact in the tails. Our results offer relevant insights about the relationship between banking and sovereign crises. In particular, during the recent financial crisis, banks’ asset return distributions have lower means and fatter tails than in the absence of a simultaneous sovereign crisis.