Price Effect of Mutual Fund Flows on the Corporate Bond Market. The French Case

We study how investors' withdrawals from mutual funds may affect the French corporate bond market. To do so, we use monthly data on flows to the French bond and mixed mutual funds as well as a database on their bond holdings at the bond-level from 2011 to 2017 provided by the Banque of France Statistics Department. Using a large sample of French corporate bonds held by funds, we run panel data régressions at the bond-level to explain their yields by macroeconomic variables, such as the sovereign 10-y rate, the short-term rate, the Vstoxx as well as bond-specific variables, such as the residual maturity, liquidity and the issuer's probability of default. We also account for the corporate securities purchasing programme (CSPP) implemented by the ECB since June 2016 by adding dummy variables on the eligible bonds. Then we add variables related to inflows/outflows to test for several hypotheses. First, our results show that flows to funds affect the yields of all corporate bonds across the board. Second, this effect is asymmetric since outflows have a greater impact on yields than inflows. Third, the greater the funds' market share in a specific bond the higher the impact on this bond is. These three results are robust to change in econometric specification. Further estimations suggest that withdrawals may raise liquidity premia and ownership by funds could amplify the response of bond yields to financial stress, although these two latter results are not significant in all econometric specifications