In recent years, mergers, acquisitions and organic growth have meant that some of the largest and most complex financial groups have come to transcend national boundaries and traditionally defined business lines. As a result, they have become a potential channel for the cross-border and...

We analyse the behaviour of credit default swaps (CDS) for a sample of firms and find support for the theoretical equivalence of CDS prices and credit spreads. When this is violated we suggest the CDS price can be viewed as an upper bound on the price of credit risk, while the spread provides a...