Search

How does uncertainty affect the costs of raising finance in the bond market and via bank loans? Empirically, this paper finds that heightened uncertainty is accompanied by an increase in corporate bond spreads, whereas spreads on bank loans remain unchanged. This finding can be explained with a model that includes costly state verification and in which banks maintain long‐term relationships with borrowers and acquire information beyond what is publicly available. After an unexpected increase in uncertainty, the probability of borrower default increases. Banks leave the loan spread unchanged to maintain the relationship. In contrast, bond spreads increase because investors demand compensation for the increased default risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives the compensation demanded by investors in risky bonds? Longstaff and Schwartz (1995) predict that one key factor is the time-varying negative correlation between interest rates and the yield spreads on corporate bonds. However, the effects of callability and taxes also need to be considered in empirical analyses. Canadian bonds have no tax effects, yet, after controlling for callability, the correlation between riskless interest rates and corporate bond spreads remains negligible. Our results provide support for reduced-form models that explicitly define a default hazard process and untie the relation between the firm's asset value and default probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We find that liquidity is priced in corporate yield spreads. Using a battery of liquidity measures covering over 4,000 corporate bonds and spanning both investment grade and speculative categories, we find that more illiquid bonds earn higher yield spreads, and an improvement in liquidity causes a significant reduction in yield spreads. These results hold after controlling for common bond-specific, firm-specific, and macroeconomic variables, and are robust to issuers' fixed effect and potential endogeneity bias. Our findings justify the concern in the default risk literature that neither the level nor the dynamic of yield spreads can be fully explained by default risk determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use institutional corporate bond trade data to estimate transactions costs in the over-the-counter bond market. I find average round-trip trading costs to be about $0.27 per $100 of par value. Trading costs are lower for larger trades. Small institutions pay more to trade than large institutions, all else being equal. Small bond dealers charge more than large ones. I find no evidence that trading costs more for lower-rated bonds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to explain the spread between rates on corporate and government bonds. We show that expected default accounts for a surprisingly small fraction of the premium in corporate rates over treasuries. While state taxes explain a substantial portion of the difference, the remaining portion of the spread is closely related to the factors that we commonly accept as explaining risk premiums for common stocks. Both our time series and cross-sectional tests support the existence of a risk premium on corporate bonds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using event-study techniques, we investigate the impact of Brexit-related events on the corporate bond yield spreads in the United Kingdom and Eurozone, respectively. We want to find out whether Brexit-related news, including the Brexit referendum itself, had an impact on the risk conditions in those two corporate bond markets. Our estimation results indicate that the announcement of the referendum result is associated with increasing credit spreads in the UK and EA. However, only the actual announcement of the UK referendum result itself had an influence on the credit spreads. Furthermore, we distinguish between the financial and the non-financial economic sectors in order to analyze more specific sector-related effects of the referendum event. Our estimation results suggest that UK credit spreads were more strongly influenced by the announcement of the results of the Brexit referendum than credit bond spreads in the Eurozone were. Finally, we split our sample into pre-referendum and post-referendum periods to consider the potential changing evaluation of the determinants of corporate bond spreads due to altering risk pricing triggered by the Brexit referendum result. We find that the effect of credit default risk is far stronger and plays a significant role in the post-referendum period in UK and EA, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Administração is the property of Instituto de Administracao da FEA-USP and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)