Empirical Analysis of Credit Risk Regime Switching and Temporal Conditional Default Correlation in Credit Default Swap Valuation: The Market liquidity effect

Kwamie Dunbar and Albert J. Edwards
Additional contact information
Albert J. Edwards: Northeast Utilities Service Company

No 2007-10, Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper, we extend the debate concerning Credit Default Swap valuation to include time varying correlation and co-variances. Traditional multi-variate techniques treat the correlations between covariates as constant over time; however, this view is not supported by the data. Secondly, since financial data does not follow a normal distribution because of its heavy tails, modeling the data using a Generalized Linear model (GLM) incorporating copulas emerge as a more robust technique over traditional approaches. This paper also includes an empirical analysis of the regime switching dynamics of credit risk in the presence of liquidity by following the general practice of assuming that credit and market risk follow a Markov process. The study was based on Credit Default Swap data obtained from Bloomberg that spanned the period January 1st 2004 to August 08th 2006. The empirical examination of the regime switching tendencies provided quantitative support to the anecdotal view that liquidity decreases as credit quality deteriorates. The analysis also examined the joint probability distribution of the credit risk determinants across credit quality through the use of a copula function which disaggregates the behavior embedded in the marginal gamma distributions, so as to isolate the level of dependence which is captured in the copula function. The results suggest that the time varying joint correlation matrix performed far superior as compared to the constant correlation matrix; the centerpiece of linear regression models.

Keywords: Credit Default Swaps; Market Liquidity; Copulas; Joint conditional distributions; Markov process; Regime Switching; Illiquidity; and Correlation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2007-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-rmg
Note: We are extremely grateful to Ben Fine, Department of Mathematics, Fairfield University, for his many insightful suggestions and guidance which helped to improve the final manuscript. This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration in the Journal of Empirical Finance.
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://media.economics.uconn.edu/working/2007-10.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uct:uconnp:2007-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics University of Connecticut 365 Fairfield Way, Unit 1063 Storrs, CT 06269-1063. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark McConnel ().