Determinants of CDS trading on major banks

Employing credit default swap (CDS) data for a sample of 52 major banks across 18 countries from 2008 to 2016, this paper investigates determinants of the outstanding net notional amount of CDS which are written on banks. We extend the current literature dealing with CDS trading by analyzing further CDS trading-specific, fundamental bank-specific as well as macroeconomic and institutional determinants with a focus on bank CDS trading. We find that, next to well-discussed determinants for corporate firms in the literature, especially a bank's tail risk, capital adequacy, loan portfolio and business model affect a bank's outstanding CDS net notional. This finding indicates that investors in the bank CDS market partly have a recourse to a fundamental analysis for their investment decision. Our study fills an important gap since empirical studies have solely focused on sovereign and corporate CDS yet. In addition, the analysis at hand provides important implications for both academics and practitioners since understanding the trading motives of bank CDS investors gives deeper insights into the still opaque CDS market.