We examine the role of insurance companies as value investors in the corporate bond market. We show that during the COVID-19 liquidity crisis, insurers acted as “buyers of last resort” and increased their corporate bond positions, particularly in bonds facing fire sales by mutual funds....

We examine the microstructure of liquidity provision in the COVID-19 corporate bond liquidity crisis. During the two weeks leading to Fed interventions, transaction costs soared, trade-size pricing inverted, and dealers, in particular non-primary dealers, shifted from buying to selling, causing...

This paper investigates execution quality issues in corporate bond trading. Using an extensive sample of bond trades by insurance companies, we find that an insurance company entering a trade of similar size and on the same side for the same bond on the same day with the same dealer will receive...

Technology transformed the trading of financial assets but has been slower to come to corporate bond trading. Combining proprietary data from MarketAxess with regulatory TRACE data, we investigate how electronic request for quote (RFQ) trading affects bond dealers and trading more generally. We...

Focusing on downgrades as stress events that drive the selling of corporate bonds, we document that the illiquidity of stressed bonds has increased after the Volcker Rule. Dealers regulated by the Rule have decreased their market-making activities while non-Volcker-affected dealers have not...

This paper provides a critical appraisal of the March 2020 crisis in fixed income markets. We synthesize the main events, characterize what appears to be an emerging consensus on what caused the market breakdowns, summarize how the Fed’s actions contributed to its resolution, and discuss...

Against the backdrop of COVID-19, we study how the interactions of mutual funds and dealers introduce fragility to the municipal bond market and carry lasting impacts. During the crisis, trading activities surge while dealers' liquidity provision plunges for mutual-fund-held bonds, leading to...

Many assets are traded in decentralized markets intermediated by dealers. In these markets, search frictions lead to trading illiquidity. Moreover, terms of trade are negotiated between investors and dealers pursuant to strategic bargaining. Investors’ intrinsic types affect both their outside...

We use a difference-in-differences framework to estimate the causal effects of the Federal Reserve's Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities (CCFs) on corporate bond credit spreads. In particular, we exploit the publication of the constituents of the SMCCF Broad Market Index to...

The rapid rise of corporate bond portfolio trading since the end of 2017 has attracted attention from practitioners and regulators alike. I show that inventory hedging explains the recent meteoric rise of corporate bond portfolio trading, likely aided by the recent proliferation of credit index...