title: Credit default swaps drawup networks: too interconnected to be stable?
abstract: We analyse time series of CDS spreads for a set of major US and European institutions in a period overlapping the recent financial crisis. We extend the existing methodology of ε-drawdowns to the one of joint ε-drawups, in order to estimate the conditional probabilities of spike-like co-movements among pairs of spreads. After correcting for randomness and finite size effects, we find that, depending on the period of time, 50% of the pairs or more exhibit high probabilities of joint drawups and the majority of spread series are trend-reinforced, i.e. drawups tend to be followed by drawups in the same series. We then carry out a network analysis by taking the probability of joint drawups as a proxy of financial dependencies among institutions. We introduce two novel centrality-like measures that offer insights on how both the systemic impact of each node as well as its vulnerability to other nodes' shocks evolve in time.
authors.affiliation: Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Rahul
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kaushik
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Battiston
mesh_terms: D005060:Europe; D006801:Humans; D017059:Models, Econometric; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States