"In this paper the behaviour of credit default swaps (CDS) are analysed for a sample of firms and support found for the theoretical equivalence of CDS prices and credit spreads. When this is violated, the CDS price can be viewed as an upper bound on the price of credit risk, while the spread...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...