Corporate bond returns in major developed economies increase with lower ratings and higher residual maturity. The performance of various factor models featuring corporate, sovereign and equity markets as factors suggests that the corporate bond factor plays a dominant role in explaining the...

After the financial crisis deepened from September 2008, large US corporations temporarily had difficulty getting funding, but conditions have gradually improved since the beginning of 2009, in step with growth in corporate bond issuance. In the US, although nonperforming loans have hampered the...

The growth of the European financial markets, together with the new, stricter regulations on the U.S. financial markets, has spurred a debate over the competitiveness of the U.S. financial markets. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by investigating the relative competitiveness of the...

Using a real-time random regime shift technique, we identify and discuss two different regimes in the dynamics of credit spreads during 2002-2012: a liquidity regime and a default regime. Both regimes contribute to the patterns observed in credit spreads. The liquidity regime seems to explain...

Utilizing the large subset of trades in which dealers act purely as agents, we decompose dealer spreads in U.S. corporate bond OTC markets into components arising from: 1) dealers' market-making role, and 2) their role as agents for their non-dealer customers. We investigate the determinants of...

Are dealers' search efforts endogenous in decentralized markets? How do dealers' search efforts affect market efficiency? We propose a model with dealers choosing idiosyncratic search intensities, and estimate the model using transaction data on U.S. corporate bonds. We find that: [1] with...

We examine abnormal returns and trading activity in bond markets around earnings announcements. Previous work provides mixed evidence on the relative impact of positive and negative surprises and the degree of response in investment-grade and speculative-grade bonds. We find that these...

Two broader types of securities issued in the financial market of an economy are Equity and Debts. Equity is a perpetual liability because it signifies an owner's legal claim after all liabilities are met, upon the assets of the entity in which the equity share is held. Bonds are debt...