This website uses cookies.

By clicking the "Accept" button or continuing to browse our site, you agree to first-party and session-only cookies being stored on your device to enhance site navigation and analyze site performance and traffic. For more information on our use of cookies, please see our Privacy Policy.

« Back to Results

Measuring Bond Liquidity

Paper Session

Sunday, Jan. 5, 2020 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (PDT)

Manchester Grand Hyatt, Seaport G
Hosted By: American Finance Association
  • Chair: Peter Feldhütter, Copenhagen Business School

Corporate Bond Illiquidity: Evidence from Government Guarantees

Kurt Lewis
,
Federal Reserve Board
Lubomir Petrasek
,
Federal Reserve Board

Abstract

We use a unique set of corporate bonds guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. to examine the default- and nondefault-related components in corporate bond spreads. Based on a matched sample of guaranteed and non-guaranteed corporate bonds, we find that 16% of the yield spread between investment grade corporate bonds and Treasury securities is not accounted for by government credit guarantees. Our estimate of the non-default component differs from the bond-CDS basis, suggesting that not only corporate bond spreads but also CDS spreads depend on non-default factors. Its magnitude is determined by the provision of dealer intermediation as well as bond-specific characteristics such as time to maturity and issue size.

Size-Adapted Bond Liquidity Measures and Their Asset Pricing Implications

Michael Reichenbacher
,
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Philipp Schuster
,
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Abstract

We develop a new class of transaction cost measures for the bond market. Standard liquidity measures suffer from the combination of two effects. First, transaction costs in OTC bond markets strongly depend on trade size. Second, many bonds are traded only scarcely with differing trading volumes over time and in the cross-section. As a result, a change in average transaction costs often indicates a change in the average trade size and not a change in liquidity. Combining full sample information for the size-cost relation with individual transaction data, our new approach does not suffer from such idiosyncratic measurement errors. Compared to standard measures, our size-adapted measures are able to explain a much larger part of yield spread variations. Furthermore, they uncover the joint pricing of liquidity level and corporate bond market liquidity risk in the cross-section of U.S. corporate bonds.

Risk Free Interest Rates

Jules van Binsbergen
,
University of Pennsylvania
William Diamond
,
University of Pennsylvania
Marco Grotteria
,
London Business School

Abstract

We estimate risk free rates unaffected by the convenience yield on safe assets by inferring them from risky options and futures prices. Our data provides time-varying estimates of the term structure of convenience yields from maturities of 1 month to 2.5 years at a minutely frequency. The convenience yield on government bonds equals about 40 basis points on average, is larger below 3 months maturity, and grows substantially during periods of financial distress. With our unique intraday estimates of the term structure of convenience yields, we estimate the high frequency response of convenience yields to monetary policy and quantitative easing. Convenience yields respond most strongly to central bank policy in the depths of the financial crisis, and both conventional and unconventional monetary stimulus reduce convenience yields. Additionally, a factor constructed from our measure of the term structure of convenience yields predicts excess bond returns even when controlling for commonly used factors in the literature. We study the dynamics of a large panel of other arbitrage spreads and find that our implied convenience yields predict other spreads and face the smallest idiosyncratic shocks, suggesting that they are highly informative measures of frictions in financial markets. Finally, we study the dynamics of a large panel of other arbitrage spreads across a variety of different markets and find that our implied convenience yields predict other spreads and face the smallest idiosyncratic shocks, suggesting that they are highly informative measures of frictions in financial markets.
Discussant(s)
Jack Bao
,
University of Delaware
Jaewon Choi
,
University of Illinois
Pietro Veronesi
,
University of Chicago
JEL Classifications
  • G1 - General Financial Markets