| Abstract: | We investigate whether primary market, original‐issue risk premiums on speculative‐grade debt are justified solely by expected defaults or whether these risk premiums also include other orthogonal risk components. Studies of secondary‐market holding period risk and return have hypothesized that risk premiums on speculative‐grade debt may be explained by bond‐ and equity‐related systematic risk and possibly other types of risk. Using an actuarial approach that considers contemporaneous correlation between default frequency and severity and first‐order serial correlation, we cannot reject the hypothesis that the entire original‐issue risk premium can be explained by expected default losses. This suggests that speculative‐grade bond primary markets efficiently price default risk and that other types of risk are priced as coincident as opposed to orthogonal risks. |
