We study the risk of holding credit default swaps (CDS) in the trading book. In particular, we compare the Value at Risk (VaR) of a CDS position to the VaR for investing in the respective firm's equity. Our sample consists of CDS – stock price pairs for 86 actively traded firms over the period...

We document the sharp increase in trading activity, gross and net notional outstanding, and overall premiums in the U.S. credit default swaps (CDS) market that took place during the 2023 debt ceiling episode. Unlike the periods leading up to the 2011 and 2013 debt ceiling events, we show that in...

Using three alternative decompositions of the credit default swap premium this study examines how investors judge the credit risk of banks and non-banks before, during, and after the financial crisis of 2007-2009. The empirical findings, based on a sample of 213 major US and European firms,...

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...

Exploiting information contained in the term-structure of sovereign credit spreads, we estimate time-varying fiscal limits – defined as the maximum outstanding debt that can credibly be covered by future primary budget surpluses. Our approach is based on a novel sovereign credit risk model...

Despite a large and growing theoretical literature on flights to safety, there does not appear to exist an empirical characterization of flight-to-safety (FTS) episodes. Using only data on bond and stock returns, we identify and characterize flight to safety episodes for 23 countries. On...