We study the nature of sovereign credit risk using an extensive set of sovereign CDS data. We find that the majority of sovereign credit risk can be linked to global factors. A single principal component accounts for 64 percent of the variation in sovereign credit spreads. Furthermore, sovereign...

This paper examines the recent period of relatively low credit spreads in Japan, with particular emphasis on the marketfs assessments of the credit risks of large Japanese banks implicit in the prices of credit derivatives. We extract the market-price implied likelihood of a credit event in the...

We study the nature of sovereign credit risk using an extensive sample of CDS spreads for 26 developed and emerging-market countries. Sovereign credit spreads are surprisingly highly correlated, with just three principal components accounting for more than 50 percent of their variation....