The Determinants of Corporate CDS Spreads: Do Equity Liquidity and Jump Matter? Open Access

This paper investigates whether equity liquidity and stock return jump are important determinants for the Korean corporate CDS spreads. The previous studies mainly have examined the determinants of CDS spread time series levels, whereas this study focuses on the determinants of changes or differences of CDS spread time series as well as the effecting factors of cross-sectional variations. Using monthly averaged CDS quotes for 29 firms from Jan. 2005 to Nov. 2012, we first demonstrate that the explanatory power for CDS spread changes is improved to about 39% by adding both credit risk-related market variables and firm-level jump variables, contrary to the low explanatory power (approximately 21%) reported by the previous study. However, since the principle component analysis for residuals from the regression shows that a common risk factor exists, it is possible that additional important factor remains. In addition, we demonstrate that stock return volatility is a robust variable to explain the cross-sectional differences in CDS spreads. We also find that the equity liquidity is a robust and significant factor for the cross-sectional differences in CDS spreads after the global financial crisis period. The result implies that, after the recent crisis, investors more actively considered equity illiquidity costs when they hedged their CDS exposures by stocks.