We investigate the liquidity management of firms following the inception of credit default swaps (CDS) markets on their debt, which allow hedging and speculative trading on credit risk to be carried out by creditors and other parties. We find that reference firms hold more cash after CDS trading...

Credit default swaps (CDSs) are an effective tool to trade credit risk, and they can improve the corporate information environment. We find that firms use more public debt and less bank debt when CDSs reference their debt start trading. The results are robust to the endogeneity of CDS trading....