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The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads using a large sample of countries.

In this paper, the authors use a wide set of the sovereign CDS data of 78 countries. To measure the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors use the daily change of confirmed cases collected from Our World in Data. They use panel regressions to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sovereign credit risk.

The authors show how sovereign CDS spreads have widened significantly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the most conservative estimate, a 1% increase in COVID-19 infections leads to a 0.17% increase in sovereign CDS spreads. Furthermore, this effect is stronger for developing countries and countries with worse healthcare systems. Government policies partially offset the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, although these same policies also lead to widening sovereign CDS spreads. Sovereign CDS spreads narrow dramatically several months after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, the results suggest that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a massive shock to the global financial stability.

This paper provides new evidence that COVID-19 widens sovereign CDS spreads. The authors further show that this widening effect is felt most strongly in developing economies.

The purpose of this paper is to construct an index for systemic risk in China.

This paper develops a systemic risk index for China (SRIC) using textual information from 26 leading newspapers in China. Our index measures the systematic risk from 21 topics relating to China’s economy and provides narratives of the sources of systemic risk.

SRIC effectively predicts changes in GDP, aggregate financing to the real economy and the purchasing managers’ index. Moreover, SRIC explains several other commonly used macroeconomic indicators. Our risk measure provides a helpful monitoring tool for policymakers to manage systemic risk.

The paper construct an index of systemic risk based on the information extracted from newspaper articles. This approach is new to the literature.