We provide a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of trading in the sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) market, using weekly data for single-name sovereign CDS from October 2008 to September 2015. We describe the anatomy of the sovereign CDS market, derive a law of motion for gross...

I study the term structure of credit default swap spreads to understand the dynamics of global and country-specific risk factors in explaining the time-variation in sovereign credit risk. The analysis suggests that the shape of the term structure conveys significant information on the relative...

The shape of the term structure of credit default swap spreads is an informative signal about the relative importance of global and domestic risk factors to the time variation of sovereign credit spreads. Using a geographically dispersed panel of 44 countries, I show that the relative importance...

We show that existing metrics of CDS returns poorly approximate cash flow-based CDS returns. Given the complexities involved in computing CDS returns correctly, we provide a simple closed-form approximation that bears a correlation of no less than 99% with the true return series. Our work...