CDS Industrial Sector Indices, Credit and Liquidity Risk

Abstract

This paper studies the risk spillover among US Industrial Sectors and focuses on the connection between credit and liquidity risks. The proposed methodology is based on quantile regressions and considers the movements of CDS Industrial Sector Indices depending on common risk factors such as equity risk, risk appetite, term spread and TED spread. We use CDS Industrial indexes and the market risk factor to identify the impact of market liquidity risk and market credit risk in the different US Industries and give evidence of the heterogeneity of this relation. We show that all the sectors are largely exposed to the non investment grade bond spread indicating that credit risk is largely a common factor rather than a sector specific factor. With a lower impact, we also find that market risk and interest rate risk are also common factors, as well as liquidity risk. These results indicate that diversification among sectors might collapse when credit, equity and liquidity events hit the market. The information extracted from CDS market could thus provide relevant information for sector allocation strategies.

Keywords: credit risk, common factors, liquidity risk

JEL Classification: F34, G12, G15