Counterparty Risk and Counterparty Choice in the Credit Default Swap Market∗ Wenxin Du Salil Gadgil Michael B. Gordy Clara Vega November 2018 Abstract We investigate how market participants price and manage counterparty credit risk in the post-crisis period using confidential trade repository data on single-name credit default swap (CDS) transactions. We find that counterparty risk has a modest impact on the pricing of CDS contracts, but a large impact on the choice of counterparties. We show that market participants are significantly less likely to trade with counterparties whose credit risk is highly correlated with the credit risk of the reference entities and with counterparties whose credit quality is low. Our results suggest that credit rationing may arise under wider circumstances than previously recognized. Keywords: Counterparty credit risk, credit default swaps, central clearing, credit rationing, counterparty choice. JEL Classifications: G12, G13, G24 ∗W. Du, M. Gordy and C. Vega are with the Federal Reserve Board, 20th and C Streets NW, Washington, DC 20551, USA. S. Gadgil is at UCLA Anderson School of Management, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Ange- les, CA 90095, USA. The authors can be reached via email at
[email protected],
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[email protected]. We are grateful to DTCC for providing the data. We have benefitted from helpful comments from Robert Avery, Aaron Brown, Sean Campbell, Eduardo Canabarro, Audrey Costabile, Jorge Cruz Lopez, Michael Gibson, Jon Gregory, Erik Heitfield, Greg