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...

Using a news-based index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU), we find that EPU is positively associated with credit default swap (CDS) spreads and negatively associated with the number of liquidity providers in the CDS market. A 10% increase in EPU leads to an 8.4% increase in CDS spreads and a...

This paper studies the returns of credit default swap (CDS) indices over the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) cycle from 2005 to 2017. We document that the CDS return is significantly higher in even weeks than in odd weeks of the FOMC cycle. This pattern is linked to the resolution of...

This paper examines how the sentiment of firm-specific news affects CDS spreads conditional on the degree of information asymmetry. Using a large set of news releases, we document a strong negative relationship between the sentiment of firm-specific news and CDS spreads. More importantly,...

We study the effects of monetary policy surprises (MPSs) on corporate credit default swap (CDS) spreads. Using high-frequency surprises around Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements, we find a negative relation between changes in unexpected expansionary monetary policy and changes in...

In this paper, we study systemic risk in China using information from credit default swap (CDS) data of Chinese firms. We find a large time variation in CDS spreads. More importantly, firms’ CDS spreads co-move with each other and the first three principal components explain 94% of the...