What Drives the Commonality between Credit Default Swap Spread Changes?

Abstract

This paper documents an increase in the comovement between credit default swap (CDS) spread changes during the 2007-2009 crisis and investigates the source of that increase. One possible explanation is that comovement increased because fundamental values became more correlated. However, I find that changes in fundamentals account for only 23% of the increase in covariance. The remaining increase is attributed to changes in liquidity and the market price of default risk. In contrast, counterparty risk played an insignificant role. Although both contributed, the increase in covariance was driven more by variation in exposures than factor variance-covariance.