We examine the effect of sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) trading initiation on the occurrence of sovereign debt crises (SDC). Estimations on a large sample of 141 countries for 1980–2013 reveal that, by affecting the fiscal stance, CDS initiation increases by around 1.5 percentage points on average the probability of SDC in countries with CDS compared to the other countries. This result holds for different robustness tests and is found to be stronger for developing countries, for countries with initial lower creditworthiness, and when the degrees of central bank independence and public sector transparency are low. Consequently, compared to existing work emphasizing favorable effects, CDS trading initiation is found to have adverse effects, by increasing the occurrence of SDC. These opposite effects should fuel the literature on measuring the consequences of CDS trading initiation, and its design and implementation from a policy perspective.

In the wake of the financial crisis considerable momentum has built up behind proposals to extend central counterparty (CCP) clearing in the over-the-counter derivatives markets. However, implementation is proving complex. This paper argues that one cause of this complexity is that the public sector is seeking to incorporate into legislation (and require the wider use of) a privately owned and operated risk management mechanism. As a matter of law, the paper argues that CCP clearing can be understood as a market-generated ‘legal device’; in other words, one designed to support the markets by means of the interaction of various private law techniques. Following this analysis through, the paper highlights the benefits and drawbacks which derive from the legal techniques underlying CCP clearing (standardisation of contracts, asset-backing, netting and so on) and argues that these qualities are inherent to the device. It concludes that the inherent capacity of CCP clearing gives rise to a qualitatively different set of challenges for policymakers to those arising from technical implementation and it explains that both types of problem need to be addressed if the CCP prescription is to be effective.

In a simple stationary setting with constant interest rate, we derive pricing formulas for defaultable bonds with stochastic recovery rate using a replication argument. Replication is done by using an insurance contract (i.e. a kind of credit default swap), the price of which is determined by a dynamic premium calculation principle. We consider two cases, a linear one, where pricing amounts to solving an inhomogeneous linear ODE, and a super-linear case where a Riccati ODE has to be solved.