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...