An Analysis of CDS Market Liquidity by the Hawkes Process

We study the credit default swap (CDS) markets in the U.S. and Japan, focusing on bid-ask spreads which are closely related to the liquidity of the markets. Since bid-ask spreads dramatically surged during the financial crisis (2008-2009) and the market became very illiquid, it is crucially important to investigate how bid-ask spreads fluctuate. In this paper, not only do we make dynamic analysis of the bid-ask spreads in both countries but propose a model to predict bid-ask spreads via the self-exciting intensity process (the Hawkes process).