Optimal Refunding Strategies, Transaction Costs, and the Market Value of Corporate Debt

The primary purpose of this paper is to consider both qualitatively and quantitatively the effects of refunding transaction costs and interest rate uncertainty on optimal refunding strategies and the market value of corporate debt. A dynamic model of corporate bond refunding with transaction costs is developed that simultaneously solves for the optimal refunding strategy, the value of the refunding call option, the value of the bond liability to the firm, and the market (investor) value of the fixed-rate contract. We provide examples in which the price of the callable bond does exceed the call price, and we examine whether or not typical levels of refunding costs are sufficient to explain the magnitude and duration of frequently observed premiums on callable corporate bonds.     

An Integrated Model of Debt Issuance, Refunding, and Maturity

We integrate previous work in this area and develop a multiperiod model that simultaneously determines bond refunding, bond issuance, maturity structure, cash holdings, and bank borrowing policies. The focus here is on providing the required debt funds in the most cost efficient fashion. A strength of the model is that it allows for time varying interest costs, transaction costs, issuance costs, and refunding costs to be firm specific. The output of the model lays out the optimal financing decisions for each time interval that minimize the total discounted cost of providing the funds that match the requisite funds. By limiting the surplus funds available, the model minimizes the management incentive to over invest and thereby reduces the agency costs. The model has economic implications for the financing decisions and the firm's default risk, growth opportunities, riskiness of cash flows, and firm size. JEL Classification: G30     

BOND REFUNDING IN EFFICIENT MARKETS: A DYNAMIC ANALYSIS WITH TAX EFFECTS

This paper provides a dynamic analysis of the bond refunding problem in an efficient market setting with corporate taxes and transaction costs. A new methodology is developed to analyze the optimal exercise problem in the presence of imperfections. This analysis enables prediction of the effect of changes in corporate tax laws on the refunding decision. It also explains the empirical observation that bonds are often called when the bond price is below the call price.     

OPTIMAL BOND CALL POLICIES UNDER TRANSACTIONS COSTS

In this paper I analyze the effects of refunding transactions costs on the firm's optimal call policy. Refunding transactions costs cause the firm to delay calling a bond when its market value first reaches the call price. This effect causes the price path of a callable bond to be a locally concave function of the interest rate, reaching a maximum price above the call price. Comparative static results show that the magnitude of the premium above the call price is an increasing function of transactions costs. An empirical test on a sample of nonconvertible bonds supports the model's transactions costs prediction.     

On the Matter of Parity among Financial Obligations

The lessons of the leasing literature concerning the impact of leases on the debt capacity of a firm are reviewed and summarized to establish an approach to the analysis of the corporate bond refunding decision. A general proposition regarding financial obligation parity is established, and from that a clear bond refunding decision rule is developed. Previous debates in the literature about appropriate discount rates and about the appropriate cash flows to be discounted for refunding decisions are clarified.     

Don't Waste a Free Lunch: Managing the Advance Refunding Option

A callable municipal bond issue funding a new project is usually eligible for “advance refunding”—that is, refunding between the issue date and the call date. Such refunding is accomplished by issuing new bonds, and investing the proceeds in an escrow portfolio of Treasury securities whose cash flows pay off the outstanding issue until the call date, when the old bonds are retired. Under favorable market conditions, advance refunding enables a municipality to lock in lower interest rates prior to the call date; waiting until that date would expose the issuer to the risk of higher rates. The right to advance refund is an option whose value depends not only on the issuer's borrowing rate, but also on Treasury rates, which determine the cost of the escrow portfolio. What makes this option (referred to by the authors as the “ARO”) unusual is that it is effectively a free lunch for the issuer. While investors pay a lower price for a callable bond, the price is not affected by the bond's eligibility for advance refunding. The free lunch is demonstrable when the yield of the escrowed Treasuries is higher than the issuer's funding rate to the call date. In such cases, the present value of the cash flows to the call date (which is how the market prices a deep‐in‐the‐money callable bond) exceeds the cost of the escrow. This excess effectively enables the issuer to retire the bonds below their fair market value. Another manifestation of the free lunch offered by advance refunding transaction occurs when the savings exceed the expected value of waiting—that is, when the value of the call option is less than the currently realizable savings. One important consideration when deciding whether and when to advance refund is that the ARO can be exercised only once in an issue's refunding life‐cycle. If an issue is advance refunded, its replacement cannot be. But if an issue is refunded once it becomes callable, the ARO stays alive in the replacement issue. In this article, the authors develop an analytical framework to help issuers deal with this problem. First, they explore how the value of the ARO depends on coupon, maturity, time to call, and prevailing Treasury rates. Then they use the results to make a recommendation about the advance refunding decision: act now or wait? To answer this question, the authors extend the standard measure of refunding efficiency to incorporate the ARO of the replacement issue. Incorporating the ARO of the replacement issue slows down the signal to advance refund, whereas failure to do so could lead to a suboptimal decision. Near the call date, issuers may be better off locking in savings with a hedge rather than sacrificing the eligibility of the replacement issue for advance refunding.     

Municipal bonds: a contingent claims perspective

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the municipal bond market with an emphasis on the numerous embedded contingent claims. Embedded contingent claims include the standard call features, sinking funds, the advance refunding option, the synthetic advance refunding option, the credit risk option (default risk), marketability, and the numerous tax-related events. Municipal bond investors must carefully assess the relative value of these contingent claims before investing in municipal bonds. Also, due to unique risk premiums within the municipal bond market, it is important to carefully structure the municipal bond holdings, paying particular attention to duration, within the context of an overall financial plan. There appears to be a benefit to lengthening the duration of the municipal bond portion of the portfolio.     

银行间债市收益率上扬的成因及后市展望

自2013年6月以来,利率的上行趋势已从货币市场利率扩散到中长端国债收益率,并蔓延到短端收益率。回归分析结果表明,经济基本面和资金面仅可部分解释国债收益率的上涨。文章进一步分析指出,货币政策维持中性偏紧趋向、金融机构调整资产配置结构削减债券投资额度、银行筹资方式多元化推高资金成本这三大因素,也是引起本轮利率接力上行的显著外力。中长期看,债券市场收益率中枢将随之抬升。在中性偏紧的货币政策基调没有改变前,债券市场将只有阶段性回嗳而无趋势性好转的行情。     

Reinsuring Climatic Risk Using Optimally Designed Weather Bonds

The aim of this paper is to determine the optimal structure of a weather bond, i.e. a bond whose coupons depend on the occurence of a weather event. The stress is put more on the structuration than on the simple pricing of the bond. Therefore, instead of looking only at the bond issue, we consider it as a part of a more general transaction, involving three agents: a firm, which wants to be hedged against its weather risk, an investor, which buys the bond and a bank, which has an intermediary key role. Then, we derive the optimal characteristics of the whole transaction. But the bond structure which is obtained, corresponds to a minimal structure: indeed, only the bond optimal price function and its optimal reimbursement level (amount which is paid back when an event occurs) can be determined while there is a degree of freedom in the choice of the optimal coupon. Therefore, this indeterminacy may be interpreted as a marketing tool and it could play an important role in the negotiation process between the issuer and the investor.     

RATCHET BONDS: MAXIMUM REFUNDING EFFICIENCY AT MINIMUM TRANSACTION COST

Callable bonds, which are widely used by corporate borrowers to manage interest rate risk, have several major drawbacks. Foremost is the transaction cost of refunding. In addition, poor execution—calling too early or too late—is common, causing a transfer of wealth from shareholders to bondholders.
The Ratchet bond captures the advantages of a callable bond—the ability to lower interest costs when rates decline—while eliminating its undesirable features. If rates fall after issuance, the coupon of a Ratchet bond automatically resets to the yield of a specified Treasury bond plus some fixed spread. The resulting "step-down" cash flow pattern resembles that of a sequence of callable bonds that are refunded to the same original maturity date.
The Tennessee Valley Authority was the first to use this innovative structure. In June 1998, they sold $575 million 6.75%"PARRS" with a 30-year maturity and annual rate resets beginning after five years. Moreover, as this article went to print, TVA announced its intent to sell another large Ratchet issue with features virtually identical to the PARRS described in this article.     

Credit ratings and convertible bond prices: a simulation-based valuation

This study presents a simulation-based model of convertible bond prices under the assumption of stochastic interest rates. The model is developed such that the convertible bond price explicitly depends on the credit rating at the time of issuance. Key ideas explored in this study include terminating the simulated sample path immediately when the issuer defaults on the bond at time t, which is the same as the investor and the issuer optimally exercising their options and discounting the resulting cash flows at a risk-free rate. In turn, the defaulted group of sample paths belongs to the bottom xth percentile of the realized stock prices at each time, which is exogenously given by the cumulative or marginal default probability of a firm that has the same rating as the issuer. Upon calibrating the model, we can see that the moneyness of convertible bonds is strongly responsible for influencing the convertible bond price when the rating changes. Furthermore, the effects of stochastic interest rates are shown to be possibly significant when the interest rate risk’s market price is not zero.     

基于双因素Wang转换方法的长寿风险债券定价研究

在比较国外经典债券设计的基础上,基于离散型死亡率模型假设,设计一种可调整上触碰点的触发型长寿债券,运用带永久跳跃的APC模型和双因素Wang转换定价方法对长寿债券进行定价,实证结果表明:在不同的参数组合下的风险溢价均处在一个合理的范围,由于模型参数多、可用死亡率数据年限短,风险溢价的结果对无风险利率等参数敏感性较高.     

基于我国国债回购市场的利率预期理论检验

本文在给出利率期限结构预期假说的定义及其推论的基础上，利用单位根和协整检验方法对上交所国债回购市场的利率数据进行了检验，结果表明国债回购利率序列均为一阶单整，由各个国债回购利率所构成的利率系统仅由一个共同的随机趋势驱动，因此得出利率预期假说在我国国债回购市场是有效的结论。本文利用向量误差修正模型对各个国债回购利率的估计结果进一步验证了这一点。     

Trading strategies based on term structure model residuals

The term structure of interest rates is an important input for basically every pricing model and is mostly calibrated on coupon bond prices. Therefore, the estimated interest rates should accurately explain the market prices of these bonds. However, nearly all empirical papers on interest rate estimation, e.g. Svensson, L.E.O. 1994. Estimating and interpreting forward interest rates: Sweden 1992–1994, IMF Working Paper, International Monetary Fund, report significant pricing errors in their sample. So an important question is what drives these pricing errors of the bonds. One simple explanation would be different tax treatment or different liquidity, but most papers on this research topic, e.g. Elton, E., and T.C. Green. 1998. Tax and liquidity effects in pricing government bonds. Journal of Finance 53: 1533–62, cannot fully explain the observed pricing errors. Therefore, these errors must be at least partially caused by either model misspecification or by the deviation of particular bond prices from general market conditions, i.e. mispricing revealing insufficient market efficiency. We provide empirical evidence for the German government bond market that risk-adjusted trading strategies based on bond pricing errors can yield about 15 basis points p.a. abnormal return compared to benchmark portfolios. Furthermore, the abnormal returns are continuously achieved over the whole time period and not randomly on a few days and show a relation to changes in the level and the curvature of the term structure of interest rates. Therefore, pricing errors contain economic information about deviations of bond prices from general market conditions and are not exclusively caused by model misspecification and/or differences in liquidity and tax treatment of individual bonds.     

我国债券市场价格波动的均衡与因果分析

债券价格的决定理论主要有古典利率理论、流动偏好理论、可贷资金理论和理性预期理论。本文采用协整和因果检验方法，研究宏观经济变量、货币金融变量与我国债券市场价格波动的联动和因果关系。我国债券市场价格与固定资产投资、净出口，物价指数、货币供应量、金融机构存贷款和外汇储备存在长期均衡关系。居民储蓄和净出口对我国债券市场价格走势具有单向引导关系，我国债券市场价格对固定资产投资和金融机构存款具有显著影响。     

信用风险缓释工具定价研究

通过对信用风险缓释工具定价进行研究得出:(1)CRM定价的主要影响因素包括无风险基准利率,标的债券的风险敞口、违约概率、违约损失率和期限,以及CRM期限等。(2)同期国债利率和央行票据利率作为CRM的基准利率较为恰当,且模型定价对不同期限、不同信用等级的CRM定价区分度较为合理,模型定价与CRM发行交易定价较为接近,适合我国现阶段CRM产品定价。(3)可以从完善CRM定价基础数据库、探索CRM定价无风险基础利率、创新CRM标的债券评级制度、引导CRM市场主体多元化和优化CRM市场做市商制度等方面提出CRM定价优化对策。     

A Factor Allocation Approach to Optimal Bond Portfolio

This paper proposes a new method to a bond portfolio problem in a multi-period setting. In particular, we apply a factor allocation approach to constructing the optimal bond portfolio in a class of multi-factor Gaussian yield curve models. In other words, we consider a bond portfolio problem in terms of a factors’ allocation problem. Thus, we can obtain clear interpretation about the relation between the change in the shape of a yield curve and dynamic optimal strategy, which is usually hard to be obtained due to high correlations among individual bonds. We first present a closed form solution of the optimal bond portfolio in a class of the multi-factor Gaussian term structure model. Then, we investigate the effects of various changes in the term structure on the optimal portfolio strategy through series of comparative statics.     

金融开放与利率的外部冲击——债券市场的一个新现象

该文认为在全球化背景下,我国债券市场面临的环境也更加复杂,其他国家股市的涨跌、汇率的走势、利率的变化都会对我国债券市场的行情产生影响。文章重点分析了全球化背景下,我国利率和美国利率的共振特征,指出我国债券市场的走势与美国的相关性明显增强;进而分析了人民币汇率变动对利率波动的影响,认为在关注外部因素对我国债券市场的影响时要特别注意汇率对境内利率的影响。     

Callable Bonds: Better Value Than Advertised?

Callable bonds allow issuers to manage interest rate risk in the sense that if rates decline, the bonds can be redeemed and replaced with lower‐cost debt. Investors demand a coupon premium for giving issuers this option; and when deciding whether to issue callable or noncall‐able bonds, the issuing companies must determine whether it's worth paying the coupon premium. This article addresses two main questions about the structuring and refunding of callable bonds. The first concerns the value of the call option: At the time of issuance, does it make sense to accept the coupon premium for the option being acquired? The second concerns the optimal timing of a refunding: At refunding, do the cash flow savings provide adequate compensation for the option that is being exercised and hence given up? In perfect markets with no taxes or transactions costs, the average corporate issuer should be indifferent between issuing callable bonds or their noncallable equivalent. But corporate taxes, together with risk management considerations, can lead some issuers to prefer callable bonds, possibly with coupons that otherwise would be unacceptably high. Refunding decisions should be made using the concept of “call efficiency,” which compares the savings (net of transactions costs) from calling to the loss of option value. The latter should also account for any option that is built into the replacement issue. Transaction costs that occur when refunding diminish the value of the call option, and their effect should be factored in at the time of issuance. One way of avoiding such costs is to issue “ratchet” bonds—essentially one‐way floaters that automatically reset lower when rates decline, thus delivering the benefits of callable bonds while eliminating transaction costs.     

基于套利理论与ICIR模型的债券市场发行定价偏离研究

基于套利定价理论与利率期限结构理论,运用Tobit多元线性回归模型,得出债券发行定价的主要影响因素为债券无风险利率、债券期限溢价、债项信用评级、债券主体信用评级和债券赎回风险溢价,在此基础上再通过改进的CIR定价模型(ICIR)对2006～2010年各债券定价偏离现象进行研究的结果表明,在1%的显著性水平上,ICIR模型测算的债券理论价格通过了二级市场的定价检验,ICIR模型对债券发行定价偏离进行检验具有较强的合理性;同时,从发行年份来看,近五年来,债券定价偏离总体呈逐年下降趋势,债券发行定价与ICIR定价与二级市场定价逐步接轨,市场化程度越来越高。