Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads using a large sample of countries. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors use a wide set of the sovereign CDS data of...

This study examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on sovereign CDS spreads using a large sample of countries. We show how sovereign CDS spreads have widened significantly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the most conservative estimate, a 1% increase in COVID-19 infections...

This study investigates the effects of political uncertainty (PU) on corporate debt maturity and leverage using a novel measure of firm-specific PU. We find that PU is negatively associated with debt maturity and leverage. Furthermore, the negative effects of PU on debt maturity and leverage are...

This paper examines the effects of public news releases on the market liquidity in one of the most important OTC derivatives markets — the CDS market. We document that, at the time of news releases, the bid-ask spread is wider, the number of quotes is larger, and the number of dealers is...

This study examines the effect of economic and political uncertainty on sovereign CDS spreads using a novel panel index of world uncertainty. We document that sovereign CDS spreads widen with uncertainty. A 1% increase in uncertainty leads to a 0.86% increase in sovereign CDS spreads....

This study develops a new economic uncertainty (EU) index based on Chinese newspapers by addressing the media coverage bias of existing measures. The developed index refines the existing methods on measuring uncertainty by taking special characteristics of China into consideration, which turns...

This paper develops a systemic risk index for China (SRIC) using textual information from 26 leading newspapers in China. Our index measures the systematic risk from 21 topics relating to China’s economy and provides narratives of the sources of systemic risk. We examine the predictability of...