What Drives Systemic Credit Risk? Evidence from the US State CDS Market

The root cause of systemic risk is an issue of on-going debate. We document evidence that common shocks of macroeconomic fundamentals are key driver of US state systemic credit risk. A structure model is developed to show importance of economic fundamentals. We find that macroeconomic variables have higher explanatory power for the temporal variation in state credit spreads and its systemic component than do financial market variables. Empirical evidence points to the macroeconomic linkages, not financial linkages, as the dominating source of systemic credit risk, and suggests that state credit risk is mainly driven by the weakness in economic fundamentals