We develop a structural credit risk model to examine how the interactions of liquidity and default risk affect corporate bond pricing. By explicitly modeling debt rollover and by endogenizing the holding costs via collateralized financing, our model generates rich links between liquidity risk...

Based on archival and survey data we show that the maturity of U.S. business loans has been continuously increasing since the mid-1930s when banks invented the term loan. Concurrently, bank innovation first involved the invention of credit analysis and covenant design. Later, bank innovation...

We document capital misallocation in the U.S. investment-grade (IG) corporate bond market, driven by quantitative easing (QE). Prospective fallen angels -- risky firms just above the IG rating cutoff -- enjoyed subsidized bond financing since 2009, especially when the scale of QE purchases...

Green assets delivered high returns in recent years. This performance reflects unexpectedly strong increases in environmental concerns, not high expected returns. German green bonds outperformed their higher-yielding non-green twins as the "greenium" widened, and U.S. green stocks outperformed...

Investor concerns about climate and other environmental regulatory risks suggest that these risks should affect corporate bond risk assessment and pricing. We test this hypothesis and find that firms with poor environmental profiles or high carbon footprints tend to have lower credit ratings and...

High-yield debt including leveraged loans is characterized by incurrence financial covenants, or "cov-lite" provisions. A traditional loan agreement includes maintenance covenants, which require continuous compliance with the covenant threshold, and their violation shifts the control rights to...

Insurers are the largest institutional investors of corporate bonds. However, a standard theory of insurance markets, in which insurers maximize firm value subject to regulatory or risk constraints, predicts no allocation to corporate bonds. We resolve this puzzle in an equilibrium asset pricing...

We study liquidity conditions in the corporate bond market during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects of the unprecedented interventions by the Federal Reserve. We find that, at the height of the crisis, liquidity conditions deteriorated substantially, as dealers appeared unwilling to absorb...

Corporate bond markets proved remarkably resilient against a sharp contraction caused by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. We document three important findings: (1) bond issuance increased immediately when the contraction hit, whereas, in contrast, syndicated loan issuance was low; (2) Federal Reserve...

We analyze the effect of the US Federal Reserve's monetary policy on EME sovereign and corporate bond markets by focusing on two dimensions: the evolution of the structure (size and currency composition) of the bond markets and their allocations within the bond portfolios of US investors. Global...