wish to thank Andre Haris, Lozan Bakayatov, and Davron Yakubov for their excellent data collection efforts. In addition, we thank the financial assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. All errors remain the responsibility of the authors. Corporate Yield Spreads and Bond Liquidity We examine whether liquidity is priced in corporate yield spreads. Using a battery of liquidity measures covering over 4000 corporate bonds and spanning investment grade and speculative categories, we find that more illiquid bonds earn higher yield spreads; and that an improvement of liquidity causes a significant reduction in yield spreads. These results hold after controlling for common bond-specific, firm-specific, and macroeconomic variables, and are robust to issuers ’ fixed effect and potential endogeneity bias. Our finding mitigates the concern in the default risk literature that neither the level nor the dynamic of yield spreads can be fully explained by default risk determinants, and suggests that liquidity plays an important role in corporate bond valuation.

We identify and estimate the sources of risk that cause corporate bonds to earn an excess return over default-free bonds. In particular, we estimate the risk premium associated with a default event. Default is modelled using a jump process with stochastic intensity. For a large set of firms, we model the default intensity of each firm as a function of common and firm-specific factors. In the model, corporate bond excess returns can be due to risk premia on factors driving the intensities and due to a risk premium on the default jump risk. The model is estimated using data on corporate bond prices for 104 US firms and historical default rate data. We find significant risk premia on the factors that drive intensities. However, these risk premia cannot fully explain the size of corporate bond excess returns. Next, we estimate the size of the default jump risk premium, correcting for possible tax and liquidity effects. The estimates show that this event risk premium is a significant and economically important determinant of excess corporate bond returns.

Abstract not found

WITH INTERNATIONAL reserves four times as large, in terms of their GDP, as in the early 1990s, emerging market countries seem more protected than ever against shocks to their current and capital accounts. Some have argued that this buildup in reserves might be warranted as insurance against the increased volatility of capital flows associated with financial globalization.1 Others view this development as the unintended conse-quence of large current account surpluses and suggest that the level of international reserves has become excessive in many of these countries.2 1

Do bond investors demand credit quality or liquidity? The answer is both, but at different times and for different reasons. Using data on the Euro-area government bond market, which features a unique negative correlation between credit quality and liquidity across countries, we show that the bulk of sovereign yield spreads is explained by differences in credit quality, though liquidity plays a nontrivial role, especially for low credit risk countries and during times of heightened market uncertainty. In contrast, the destination of large flows into the bond market is determined almost exclusively by liquidity. We conclude that credit quality matters for bond valuation but that, in times of market stress, investors chase liquidity, not credit quality. (JEL G10, G12) In times of economic distress, we often observe investors rebalance their portfolios toward less risky and more liquid securities, especially in fixed-income markets. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as a flight-to-quality and a flight-to-liquidity, respectively. While the economic motives of these two phenomena are clearly distinct from each other, empirically disentangling a flight-to-quality from a flight-to-liquidity is difficult because, as Ericsson and

This paper examines specification issues and estimates diffusive and jump risk premia using S&P futures option prices from 1987 to 2003. We first develop a test to detect the presence of jumps in volatility, and find strong evidence supporting their presence. Based on the cross-sectional fit of option prices, we find strong evidence for jumps in prices and modest evidence for jumps in volatility. We are not able to identify a statistically significant diffusive volatility risk premium. We do find modest but statistically and economically significant jump risk premia.

In this paper we compare market prices of credit default swaps with model prices. We show that a simple reduced form model outperforms directly comparing bonds’ credit spreads to default swap premiums. We find that the model yields unbiased premium estimates for default swaps on investment grade issuers, but only if we use swap or repo rates as proxy for default-free interest rates. This indicates that the government curve is no longer seen as the reference default-free curve. We also show that the model is relatively insensitive to the value of the assumed recovery rate.

We develop a structural bond valuation model to simultaneously capture liquidity and credit risk. Our model implies that renegotiation in financial distress is influenced by the illiquidity of the market for distressed debt. As default becomes more likely, the components of bond yield spreads attributable to illiquidity increase. When we consider finite maturity debt, we find decreasing and convex term structures of liquidity spreads. Using bond price data spanning 15 years, we find evidence of a positive correlation between the illiquidity and default componentsofyieldspreadsaswellassupportfordownward-slopingtermstructuresof liquidity spreads. Credit risk and liquidity risk have long been perceived as two of the main justifications for the existence of yield spreads above benchmark Treasury notes or bonds (see Fisher (1959)). Since Merton (1974), a rapidly growing body of literature has focused on credit risk. 1 However, while concern about market liquidity issues has become increasingly marked since the autumn of 1998, 2 liquidity remains a relatively unexplored topic, in particular, liquidity for defaultable securities. 3 This paper develops a structural bond pricing model with liquidity and credit risk. The purpose is to enhance our understanding of both the interaction between these two sources of risk and their relative contributions to the yield spreads on corporate bonds. Throughout the paper, we define liquidity as the ability to sell a security promptly and at a price close to its value in frictionless markets, that is, we think of an illiquid market as one in which a sizeable discount may have to be incurred to achieve immediacy. We model credit risk in a framework that allows for debt renegotiation as in Fan and Sundaresan (2000). Following François and Morellec (2004), we also introduce

are grateful for the many helpful comments and contributions of Don Chin, Qiang

Abstract. We study the nature of sovereign credit risk using an extensive sample of CDS spreads for 26 developed and emerging-market countries. Sovereign credit spreads are surprisingly highly correlated, with just three principal components accounting for more than 50 percent of their variation. Sovereign credit spreads are generally more related to the U.S. stock and high-yield bond markets, global risk premia, and capital flows than they are to their own local economic measures. We find that the excess returns from investing in sovereign credit are largely compensation for bearing global risk, and that there is little or no country-specific credit risk premium. A significant amount of the variation in sovereign credit returns can be forecast using U.S. equity, volatility, and bond market risk premia.