Abstract
Corporate bond spreads are affected by both credit risk and liquidity and it is difficult to disentangle the two factors empirically. In this paper we separate out the credit risk component by examining bonds that are issued by the same firm and that trade on the same day. Our sample of bond pairs provides two yield spreads which, if they differ, vary only because of differences in liquidity. We then investigate the determinants of the differences in yield spreads. We find that standard liquidity measures do a poor job of explaining spreads, and that incorporating the information from other bonds issued by the firm and from bonds of other firms can significantly improve the explanatory power of those liquidity measures. Still, a significant portion of the spread is left unexplained and it is largely driven by a common unknown factor. We conclude that good proxies for the liquidity component of corporate bond spreads remain elusive.
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