Working Paper

The temporal relationship between individual stocks and individual bonds

Abstract: This paper investigates the comovements of stocks and bonds at the individual firm level. Based on a sample of 702 corporate bonds, individual stock returns and bond yield changes are found to be negatively correlated, suggesting that the comovements of individual stocks and bonds are largely driven by information about the mean value of the firms' assets, rather than the variance of asset returns. Furthermore, lagged stock returns are found to have explanatory power for current bond yield changes, but current stock returns are unrelated to lagged bond yield changes, indicating that stocks lead bonds in reflecting firm-specific information.

Keywords: Stock - Prices; Bonds; Corporate bonds;