This paper provides the first empirical evidence of the externalities of credit default swaps (CDS). We find that a firm's leverage is lower when a larger proportion of its revenue is derived from CDS-referenced customers. This finding is robust to alternative samples and measures, placebo...

We examine interactions between investment and financing decisions in a dynamic model where the firm can alter the mix of debt and equity financing and exercise a randomly arriving and potentially short lived growth option. The firm will typically finance the exercise of the growth option with...

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...