If the firm chooses the stock of capital, labor, cash (distributions) so as to maximize its expected discounted present value, its investment policy should adjust endogenously to changes in investor preferences. It is hypothesized that quantitative easing (QE) affects asset prices through a...

Most tests of preferred habitat theory are indirect; they infer the existence of preferred habitat behaviour in financial markets by examining the behaviour of asset prices. We instead identify preferred habitat behaviour directly from whether investors show a preference towards a particular...

This paper uses a unique security-level data set to demonstrate that foreign institutional investors shift their U.S. corporate bond portfolios toward bonds with higher credit spreads when U.S. monetary policy tightens, which reflects institutional factors related to nominal return targets and...

Institutional funds have concentrated ownership by a few institutional investors, infrequent outflows and essentially no leverage. Yet using unique granular data on the bond holdings of institutional funds, we show that their trading behavior is strongly procyclical: they actively move into...

We use unique institutional securities holdings data to examine the trading behaviour of delegated institutional capital and its impact on bond risk premia. We show that institutional fund managers trade strongly procyclically: they actively move into higher yielding, longer duration and lower...

We examine the effect of bond Exchange‐Traded Funds (ETFs) on corporate bond liquidity. Using Propensity Score Matching and Difference‐in‐Differences techniques, we demonstrate that inclusion in ETFs is associated with a 10% reduction in transaction costs for high yield (HY) bonds and 4%...

The financial instability stemming from large volumes of simultaneous selling in the corporate bond market has been a topic of concern in recent years. Investors in this market care primarily about the downside risk of a firm given their concave payoff function, and this is precisely the...

Using a comprehensive database of corporate news, we find that bond funds trade against the direction of news sentiment. The trading against news phenomenon is concentrated in funds selling on positive news and in the post-financial crisis period when dealer liquidity provision is constrained....

Using comprehensive data on U.S. corporate bond trades since 2002, we find that retail bond investors over-rely on untimely credit ratings, neglect firm fundamentals, and appear to misunderstand the trade-off between bond risk and yields. Specifically, retail investors appear to select bonds by...

Using data on institutional investors' bond holdings, we investigate the resilience of green bonds to the COVID-19 shock in a difference-in-differences framework. We find that during the COVID outbreak green bonds experience lower sales, on average, while in normal times no significant...