We examine the question of the determinants of corporate bond credit spreads using both weekly and monthly option-adjusted spreads for nine corporate bond indices from Merrill Lynch from January 1997 to July 2002. We find that the Russell 2000 index historical return volatility and Conference...

This paper revisits the question of the determinants of corporate bond credit spreads using some new explanatory variables with both weekly and monthly option-adjusted credit spreads of corporate bond indices from Merrill Lynch. We find that among the new variables, the interest rate historical...

This study examines the ability of government bond fund managers to time the bond market, based on their monthly or quarterly holdings of Treasury securities during the period 1997-2006. We nd that, on average, government bond funds exhibit signi cantly positive timing ability at the one-month...

Corporate bond spreads are affected by both credit risk and liquidity and it is difficult to disentangle the two factors empirically. In this paper we separate out the credit risk component by examining bonds that are issued by the same firm and that trade on the same day. Our sample of bond...

We show that credit risk accounts for only a small fraction of yield spreads for investment-grade bonds of all maturities, with the fraction lower for bonds of shorter maturities, and that it accounts for a much higher fraction of yield spreads for high yield bonds. This conclusion is shown to...

This paper investigates the impact of debt covenant protection on the cross section of equity returns with a firm-level covenant index and four sub-indices. We find that firms with weaker covenant protection (lower covenant index levels) earn significantly higher risk-adjusted equity returns...

Insurance firms are a key player in the corporate bond market. In this study, we consider the role of life insurers as "rainy day" liquidity providers who improve liquidity in stressful conditions due to the nature of long-term buy-and-hold investments. To this end, we present evidence that...

We show that credit risk accounts for only a small fraction of the observed corporate-Treasury yield spreads for investment grade bonds of all maturities, with the fraction smaller for bonds of shorter maturities; and that it accounds for a much higher fraction of yield spreads for junk bonds....