Trust and use of covenants

This paper provides new evidence on how cultural norms affect contract design in international transactions. By using a comprehensive dataset on Yankee bonds, we find that bond contracts include more covenants when the issuer comes from a country with a lower level of trust. This substitution effect between trust and contractual detail holds after controlling for a variety of controls in country, firm and security level. The findings suggest that foreign firms can write sophisticated contracts that overcome the shortage of trust and facilitate the access to global capital markets.     

Catastrophe bond spread and hurricane arrival frequency

Catastrophe bonds are the most successful alternative risk transfer tools in transferring catastrophic insurance risk to capital markets. This research provides empirical insights about the predictive power of catastrophe bond spreads in forecasting catastrophe arrival frequency as a test of the catastrophe bond market’s price discovery efficacy. Primary-market data for cat bonds, catastrophe arrival frequency data for hurricanes and windstorms, and climate variable data for Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation and CO₂ change rate are collected over June 1997 to March 2013 to examine this power. The calibration results show that cat bond spreads convey valuable incremental information as measured by the Akaike Information Criterion. Furthermore, in an out-sample test for hurricanes prediction, merging the conventional climate variables approach with our market-based forward-looking predictions reduces prediction errors by about 3% over the sample period. As the catastrophe bond market continues to grow with increasing trading volume, a needed ingredient to enhance market efficiency, we would expect this measure of improvement to accentuate.     

Money,Bonds, and the Liquidity Trap

This paper examines a search model of money and public bonds in which coordination frictions lead to multiple, Pareto ranked equilibria. Whether money and bonds are substitutes or complements, is not a primitive of the economy, but an equilibrium outcome. There exists an equilibrium resembling a liquidity trap, in which money and bonds are perfect substitutes, interest rates are zero, and monetary policy is ineffective; and a superior equilibrium in which money and bonds are complements, interest rates are positive and monetary policy has a liquidity effect. On this view, the liquidity trap is a belief-driven phenomenon.     

The tax-rate induced bond substitution hypothesis and the traditional textbook treatment of the relationship between tax-free and taxable bond yields

ABSTRACT

This empirical study posits and tests the ‘tax-rate induced bond substitution hypothesis,’ wherein the propensity for bond buyers to substitute tax-exempt municipal bonds for taxable bonds in their portfolios is hypothesized to be an increasing function of the maximum federal personal income tax rate. This substitution acts to elevate the real interest rate yield on taxable bonds while diminishing it on tax-exempt bonds, ceteris paribus. Two measures of real interest rates are included in the present analysis, ex post real interest rate and ex ante real interest rate. Empirical estimations for the 1981–2018 period provide strong support for the hypothesis. They reveal that the real interest rate yield on high-grade tax-exempt municipal bonds is a decreasing function of the maximum marginal federal personal income tax, whereas the real interest rate yield on taxable ten-year Treasury notes is an increasing function of that same tax rate. We examine the implications of this study and the information underlying it for the traditional formulaic textbook treatment of the relationship between yields on bonds whose interest rate payments are taxable versus those whose interest rate payments are tax exempt and find it is not as dependable as the textbooks would have us believe.     

Dispersion in news sentiment and corporate bond returns

We construct a news sentiment index at the firm level by using textual analysis of news articles and find that dispersion in news sentiment is a significant predictor of corporate bond returns. Bonds of firms with high dispersion in news sentiment have a highly significant average return of 7.38 percent. A portfolio that longs bonds with high dispersion in news sentiments and shorts bonds with low dispersion earns an average biweekly return of 8.53 percent. This finding is in line with an argument that dispersion in news sentiment is a proxy for future cash flow uncertainty.     

Do bond yields follow the hierarchy of risk post BRRD?

With a sample of 4,065 bonds issued by 63 banks from 12 euro area countries during 2013–2017, this study investigates how introducing bail-in regulation has influenced bond yields in secondary markets, by distinguishing between non-bail-inable and different classes of bail-inable bonds. The bail-in risk premium does not follow the hierarchy of risk; it is stronger for less risky bonds. The effect on the spread between senior unsecured and non-bail-inable bonds is much higher than for subordinated bonds. Regarding subordinated bonds, the impact is higher for securities excluded from regulatory capital than for those included.     

Rethinking the relationship between local government and financial markets

In the past 20 years local governments have increasingly looked to financial markets for capital financing. The markets want local governments to change their accounting systems and become more transparent, in order to offer information that is more appropriate to private sector investors. The authors argue that this approach is only a partial solution, and that local government and financial institutions would both benefit from changes in their relationships. The article identifies a double knowledge gap that needs to be filled if the public and private sectors want to work together as long-term financial partners.     

Walking the contractual tightrope: a transaction cost economics perspective on social impact bonds

ABSTRACT

Transaction cost economics is applied in this paper to social impact bonds to explore how public service commissioners could improve outcomes-based contracts. The authors supply a framework for assessing the quality of outcomes specifications and clarify the trade-off between a robust value case for government and the transaction costs associated with specifying such a deal. Illustrated by two examples, the authors suggest that commissioners aim for a ‘requisite’ contract: one that minimizes opportunism while balancing the costs of developing a more robust outcomes specification.     

Measuring the liquidity impact on EMU government bond prices

Abstract

The work reported in this paper aimed to measure the impact of liquidity on European Monetary Union (EMU) government bond prices. Although there is a growing theoretical and empirical literature on liquidity effects in fixed income markets there is no clear answer to the questions how to measure liquidity and whether liquidity is priced in the market at all. The empirical analysis here is based on a unique data set containing individual bond data from six major EMU government bond markets, allowing one to compare yield curves estimated for subportfolios formed with respect to different potential liquidity measures. In a second procedure, liquidity measures are collected on the individual bond level and estimated pricing errors, given some reference yield curve, are regressed against these liquidity variables. This enables the conduction of formal tests on the pricing impact of liquidity measures. Results indicate that the benchmark property and the number of contributors are the most promising liquidity proxies having significant results in most countries. The results do not support the hypothesis that other liquidity measures under consideration, such as the on-the-run property, the issue size, and bid–ask spread related measures have a persistent price impact. A cross-country analysis of the subportfolio level indicates that liquidity effects cannot explain the size of the yield spreads between different issuers. This implies that effects other than liquidity, such as credit risk, are important driving factors of cross-country yield spreads.     

A comprehensive structural model for defaultable fixed-income bonds

An exact valuation formula for defaultable corporate coupon bonds is proved. The model incorporates discrete coupons, bankruptcy costs, taxes and the market risk generated by a stochastic risk-free structure. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we generalise previous pricing models for corporate bonds; second, we provide a comprehensive formula in order to properly disentangle the contribution of several risk factors to credit spreads.