One of the earliest signs of the financial crisis in summer 2007 was the plunge in the indicaaes compiled from credit default swaps (CDSs) on a basket of subprime backed bonds. Recently, the worsening situation in the emerging countries has been perceptible in the steep rise of CDS spreads on...

Credit default swaps (CDSs) played a major role in the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). CDSs coupled with Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) and other asset-backed financial products were heavily traded in the years preceding the GFC. Intended for sophisticated investors, CDSs are in the...

Credit default swaps (CDS) are the most common type of credit derivative. This paper provides a brief history of the CDS market and discusses its main characteristics. After describing the basic mechanics of a CDS, I present a simple valuation framework that focuses on the relationship between...

The market for Credit Default Swaps (CDS) has grown from nothing just fifteen years ago to a huge market today. For a plain-vanilla single-name CDS this primer aims to answer the questions: What is a CDS? How does a CDS behave in response to changes in the markets? How does one value a CDS? What...

The market for credit default swaps (CDS) on US government debt is remarkably thin. Relative to the amount of reference debt, the market for CDS on USA is an order of magnitude smaller than the markets for CDS on other high-grade government borrowers, such as Germany and the UK. A common theory...

I examine the effect of credit default swaps (CDSs) on the restructuring of distressed firms. Theoretically, I show that if bondholders are insured with CDSs, the participation rate in a restructuring decreases. Using a sample of distressed exchange offers, I estimate that the participation rate...

We develop an analytically tractable general equilibrium model to analyze the welfare effects of CDS trading and CDS regulation under aggregate uncertainty. If available equity capital is below a threshold, any equilibrium of the basic economy with no CDS markets features firm default and...