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Working Paper
What's Wrong with Annuity Markets?
We show that the supply of life annuities in the U.S. is constrained by interest rate risk. We identify this effect using annuity prices offered by U.S. life insurers from 1989 to 2019 and exogenous variations in contract-level regulatory capital requirements. The cost of interest rate risk management accounts for at least half of the average life annuity markups or eight percentage points. The contribution of interest rate risk to annuity markups sharply increased after the great financial crisis, suggesting new retirees' opportunities to transfer their longevity risk are unlikely to improve ...
Journal Article
Financial Stability and the Coronavirus Pandemic
The Atlanta Fed recently helped organize a conference titled “Financial Stability and the Coronavirus Pandemic.” The conference had three sessions devoted to problems focusing on various aspects of how the markets for credits responded to the COVID-19 shock including corporate bond investment funds, the corporate bond market, and the corporate loan market. This article summarizes some of the important findings of the papers presented at the conference.
Working Paper
Impacts of the Fed Corporate Credit Facilities through the Lenses of ETFs and CDX
In this study, we use the liquid and efficient bond ETF prices and CDX spreads to quantify the effects of the announcements of the Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities on the underlying corporate bonds. We find that those announcements triggered: (i) large and positive jumps in the prices of directly-eligible ETFs as well as ETFs holding eligible bonds and their close substitutes; (ii) a discrete drop in the perceived credit risk of eligible bonds especially following the April 9th announcement; (iii) a roaring back of investment-grade issuance and a pick-up in high-yield ...