Expectations of risky bond payments are unobservable and recovery rates for sovereigns are hard to estimate because they have no contractual claims to defined assets and samples of defaults are limited. A geometric version of credit spread is used to derive expected payments, dependent on...

The recent financial crisis offered an interesting opportunity to analyze the markets'; behavior in a high-volatility framework. In this paper, we analyzed the price discovery process of the Italian banks’ Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads through the Merton model, extended with the inclusion...

This paper tests whether an increase or decrease of the capital surcharge for being a global systemically important bank (G-SIB) envisaged by regulators has an impact on the CDS prices of these banks. We find evidence that the CDS spreads of a G-SIB bank increase (decrease) after the...

We examine the effects on a financial network of clearing all contracts though a central node (CN) thereby transforming the original network into a star-shaped one. The CN is capitalized with external equity and a guaranty fund. We introduce a structural systemic risk measure that captures the...

Firms with credit-default swaps (CDS) traded on their debt may face "empty creditors'' as hedged creditors have less incentive to participate in firm restructuring. We test for the existence of empty creditors by employing an exogenous change to the bankruptcy code in Germany, that effectively...

We develop a model in which investment risk drives the demand for CDS insurance. The model shows the efficiency of CDS contracting over the state of the economy. It shows that CDS overinsurance (insurance in excess of renegotiation surpluses) is procyclical, allowing for greater financing when...

We investigate the informational content of credit default swap (CDS) spreads for future volatility of (firm) assets and equity. In the cross-section, CDS spreads are significantly more informative about future asset than equity volatility. The informational content of historical and option...