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Working Paper
How New Fed Corporate Bond Programs Dampened the Financial Accelerator in the COVID-19 Recession
In the financial crisis and recession induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, many investment-grade firms became unable to borrow from securities markets. In response, the Fed not only reopened its commercial paper funding facility but also announced it would purchase newly issued and seasoned bonds of corporations rated as investment grade before the COVID pandemic. A careful splicing of different unemployment rate series enables us to assess the effectiveness of recent Fed interventions in these long-term debt markets over long sample periods, spanning the Great Depression, Great Recession and ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Price of Default Risk
A firm's instantaneous probability of default is modeled as a square-root diffusion process. The parameters of these processes are estimated for 188 firms, using both the time series and cross-sectional (term structure) properties of the individual firms' bond prices. Although the estimated models are moderately successful at bond pricing, there is strong evidence of misspecification. The results indicate that single factor models of instantaneous default risk face a significant challenge in matching certain key features of actual corporate bond yield spreads. In particular, such models have ...
Working Paper
Customer Liquidity Provision : Implications for Corporate Bond Transaction Costs
The convention in calculating trading costs in corporate bond markets is to assume that dealers provide liquidity to non-dealers (customers) and calculate average bid-ask spreads that customers pay dealers. We show that customers often provide liquidity in corporate bond markets, and thus, average bid-ask spreads underestimate trading costs that customers demanding liquidity pay. Compared with periods before the 2008 financial crisis, substantial amounts of liquidity provision have moved from the dealer sector to the non-dealer sector, consistent with decreased dealer risk capacity. Among ...
Journal Article
Trends in credit basis spreads
Market participants and policymakers were surprised by the large, prolonged dislocations in credit market basis trades during the second half of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. In this article, we examine three explanations proposed by market participants: increased idiosyncratic risks, strategic positioning by asset managers, and regulatory changes. We find some evidence of increased idiosyncratic risk during the relevant period, but limited evidence of asset managers changing their positioning in derivative products. Although we cannot quantify the contribution of these two channels to ...
Discussion Paper
Estimating the Term Structure of Corporate Bond Risk Premia
Understanding how short- and long-term assets are priced is one of the fundamental questions in finance. The term structure of risk premia allows us to perform net present value calculations, test asset pricing models, and potentially explain the sources of many cross-sectional asset pricing anomalies. In this post, I construct a forward-looking estimate of the term structure of risk premia in the corporate bond market following Jankauskas (2024). The U.S. corporate bond market is an ideal laboratory for studying the relationship between risk premia and maturity because of its large size ...
Discussion Paper
Corporate Bond Market Liquidity Redux: More Price-Based Evidence
In a recent post, we presented some preliminary evidence suggesting that corporate bond market liquidity is ample. That evidence relied on bid-ask spread and price impact measures. The findings generated significant discussion, with some market participants wondering about the magnitudes of our estimates, their robustness, and whether such measures adequately capture recent changes in liquidity. In this post, we revisit these measures to more thoroughly document how they have varied over time and the importance of particular estimation approaches, trade size, trade frequency, and the ...
Discussion Paper
Credit Market Choice
Credit default swaps (CDS) are frequently credited with being the cause of AIG’s collapse during the financial crisis. A Reuters article from September 2008, for example, notes “[w]hen you hear that the collapse of AIG […] might lead to a systemic collapse of the global financial system, the feared culprit is, largely, that once-obscure […] instrument known as a credit default swap.” Yet, despite the prominent role that CDS played during the financial crisis, little is known about how individual financial institutions utilize CDS contracts on individual companies. In a recent New ...
Discussion Paper
The Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities
On April 9, the Federal Reserve announced that it would take additional actions to provide up to $2.3 trillion in loans to support the economy in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Among the initiatives are the Primary Market and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities (PMCCF and SMCCF), whose intent is to provide support for large U.S. businesses that typically finance themselves by issuing debt in capital markets. Corporate bonds support the operations of companies with more than 17 million employees based in the United States and these bonds are key assets for retirees and pension ...
Discussion Paper
The Impact of the Corporate Credit Facilities
American companies have raised almost $1 trillion in the U.S. corporate bond market since March. If companies had been unable to refinance those bonds, their inability to repay may have led to an immediate default on all of their obligations, creating a cascade of defaults and layoffs. Based on Compustat data, an inability to access public bond markets could have affected companies employing more than 16 million people. In this post, we document the impact of the Primary Market and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities (PMCCF and SMCCF) on bond market functioning, summarizing a ...
Report
Market liquidity after the financial crisis
This paper examines market liquidity in the post-crisis era in light of concerns that regulatory changes might have reduced dealers? ability and willingness to make markets. We begin with a discussion of the broader trading environment, including an overview of regulations and their potential effects on dealer balance sheets and market making, but also considering additional drivers of market liquidity. We document a stagnation of dealer balance sheets after the financial crisis of 2007-09, which occurred concurrently with dealer balance sheet deleveraging. However, using high-frequency trade ...