As China's bond market expands rapidly, the complexity of financial guarantee networks and their implications for credit risk have become critical issues in both academic research and financial practice. Utilizing micro-level data from China's credit bond market spanning 2014 to 2024, this study constructs a multi-layer network incorporating bonds, guarantors, and issuing firms to empirically examine the impact of guarantor network centrality on bond credit spreads. The results reveal a significant U-shaped relationship: moderate centrality reduces spreads by bolstering market confidence, whereas excessive centrality increases them due to heightened systemic risk. Mechanism analyses identify systemic risk and information asymmetry as key mediating channels through which centrality affects credit risk premiums. Heterogeneity tests indicate that this U-shaped pattern is more pronounced among state-owned guarantors, real estate firms, and high-risk clusters within the network. Furthermore, both cross-layer connectivity within the multi-layer structure and regional financial development levels significantly moderate the centrality-spread relationship. These findings offer a structural perspective on credit risk pricing in emerging markets and provide valuable policy insights for credit rating system design, guarantee regulation, and systemic risk prevention. International investors could also leverage these findings to better assess systemic risk in interconnected financial markets across emerging economies.

The seminal works of Jensen and Meckling (1976) and Myers (1977) highlight the conflicts of interest between the owners, managers, and debt holders of the firm and discuss the risk-shifting behavior of the managers assumed for our purpose to be the“firm” in detriment of their debt holders. Although a considerable amount of research has been undertaken on this topic, much less studies are devoted to endogenizing risk choices in the presence of financial guarantees and in the context of corporate project financing. A firm risk’s appetite increases when it has a guarantee contract on its debt, which creates a conflict between the firm and the guarantee provider. Addressing formally this moral hazard issue, we propose an equilibrium model in which the borrowing firm and the guarantee provider pre-commit themselves to conscripted risk levels at the signature of the loan guarantee contract. We show if the borrowing firm and the guarantor precommit, the equilibrium risk level is lower than the one the firm will choose unilaterally. For short (long) maturity debts, both parties gain by agreeing on a high (low) risk project when the firm shareholders have a big equity stake in the new project. We also study the trade-off between the borrowing firm’s capital structure and its risk level. The optimal risk level of the firm is entirely determined by its ex-post capital structure.