An Empirical Analysis of the Dynamic Dependences in the European Corporate Credit Markets : Bonds vs. Credit Derivatives

This paper provides new evidence on the dynamic dependences of European corporate credit spread in three markets: Bond, Credit Default Swap (CDS), and Asset Swap (ASP). Using daily data from 2005 to 2009, we find that credit spread returns are primarily driven by innovations. The intra-market dependence during the current crisis decreases for bond and ASP innovations but increases for CDS due to the increase of counterparty risk. ASP and bond innovations are closely related suggesting that the cash component (bond) dominates the ASP innovations' behavior. On the other hand, CDS's innovations are unrelated to the bonds' and ASP's innovations