Primary Bond Market Research Articles

Should underwriters be trusted? Reducing agency costs through primary market supervision

We examine the mandated introduction of a supervised auction framework within China's primary bond market. This regulatory intervention resulted in a substantial reduction in debt costs for Chinese Bond issuers, primarily attributed to the alleviation of agency conflicts between underwriters and issuers. Leveraging unique bidder-level data obtained from a lead underwriter, our study provides replicable tools to discern collusive bidding behavior. This sheds light on instances of artificially inflated bond yields, highlighting economically burdensome practices. Our findings can assist regulators, issuers, and investors engaged in unsupervised auction mechanisms. Our insights offer potential enhancements to regulatory frameworks and operational efficiency across various sectors, including securities issuance, construction projects, and procurement.

The Covid pandemic in the market: infected, immune and cured bonds

In this paper, I analyze the developments in the euro-area primary bond market during the Covid-19 pandemic. The most surprising effect is the significant increase in the share of investment-grade bonds from 15% to 40%. Over the first phases of the crisis (from mid-February to mid-March), these bonds enjoyed a negative premium of 60 to 80 basis points. However, the premium disappeared when the market conditions further deteriorated. There is also evidence that the firms most exposed to the changes in the business model brought about by the pandemic experienced an increase in the cost of issuance of around 30 basis points. By contrast, there is no evidence that supports the existence of an increased cost for companies headquartered in countries with weak public finances, or evidence of a premium in favor of green bonds that were expected to be the backbone of a possible “green recovery”.

Do ESG scores have incremental information value on the primary bond market?——evidence from China

ESG scores are essential information tools in the capital market, but prior study has not fully discussed the effect and internal mechanism of ESG scores on bond investors’ risk pricing in the primary market. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the ESG scores and risk premium of bond issuance based on the sample of Chinese listed corporations. We find that when ESG scores of the bond issuer are higher, the investors will require a lower risk premium. The result indicates that ESG scores already have positive information effect in Chinese primary bond market. Furthermore, we make mechanism and heterogeneity tests to prove that ESG scores can provide investors with incremental information, which is helpful for bond investors to identify risks and price effectively. Our study in the context of the emerging economy of China examines the incremental information value of ESG scores for bond investors, and provides evidence for the application of sustainable development concepts in global capital markets.

ESG scores and cost of debt

As sustainable investing becomes central to capital allocation in many markets, the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics and scores have become of critical importance. This study aims to analyze the relation between the cost of debt and ESG scores. We provide evidence that the cost of debt for borrowing firms is associated with their ESG score/rating. Firms that have low ESG scores are considered to be riskier, in the sense that they are exposed to liabilities related to Environmental, Social and Corporate factors that ultimately increase their probability of default. In case of a bankruptcy unsecured bondholders' claims may be subordinate to those liabilities. Using a framework for evaluating ESG performance developed by Refinitiv, this study investigates whether firms within S&P 500 over the period 2010–2019 that exhibit strong ESG scores benefit from lower bond spreads and better bond ratings relative to firms with weaker ESG scores. After controlling for other risk characteristics our analysis points that better ESG rating is associated with lower cost of unsecured debt in the primary bond market. Our findings are consistent over the aggregate metric and all E,S, and G pillars. Furthermore, they support the ongoing calls for improved transparency, which would allow for the reporting of quantifiable ESG information in firms' disclosures.

Investor ESG Tastes and Asset Pricing: Evidence from the Primary Bond Market

Investor ESG Tastes and Asset Pricing: Evidence from the Primary Bond Market

Who Watches the Book Build? Supervising Primary Bondmarkets to Reduce Agency Costs

We study the mandated introduction of an auction (and its subsequent supervision) for the pri-mary bond market in China. These regulatory interventions significantly reduce the cost of debt for Chinese issuers. While this reduction is partly driven by reduced information asymmetry, we show the majority of the benefits flow from reduced agency conflict between underwriters and issuers. Using unique bidder-level data from a lead underwriter, we develop replicable tools and techniques to identify collusive bidding behavior that results in artificial (and economically costly) increases in bond yields. Such evidence can benefit global regulators, issuers and investors currently using unsupervised auction mechanisms.

Intra‐industry spill‐over effect of default: Evidence from the Chinese bond market

AbstractWe investigate the intra‐industry spill‐over effect of defaults in the Chinese bond market by using a sample of public corporate debt securities for the period 2014–2018. We find that both industry portfolios and individual firms witness a strong contagion effect, which further spreads to the primary bond market, triggering a surge in the debt financing cost for default industries. Moreover, this contagion effect is stronger for low‐competition industries and regulated industries, as well as when a default happens to state‐owned enterprises. Better information access and higher bond liquidity alleviate the contagion effect, lending support to the information updates and liquidity dry‐up hypotheses.

Intra-industry Spill-Over: Evidence from Chinese Bond Default

We investigate the intra-industry spill-over effect of bond defaults on the price of stocks, outstanding bonds and new bond issuances in China, the largest emerging debt market. We use a sample of A-shares and public corporate debt securities from 2006 to 2018. In the stock market, we find significantly negative reactions from individual industry rivals to industry default while weak reaction from the industry portfolios. In the bond market, both individual firms and industry portfolios witness a strong contagion effect. This contagion effect further spreads to the primary bond market, triggering a surge in the financing cost of the default firm’s competitors after the default. In addition, our study sheds lights on a rich pattern of correlations across default events, which is helpful in improving the understanding of security pricing models and the efficiency of information transfer across markets.

Domestic Sovereign Bond Market: Dynamics and Trends

This article studies the domestic bond market of Ukraine in 2016–2018. Domestic sovereign bonds make a major part of the public and publicly guaranteed debt of Ukraine and represent more than one third of the sovereign liabilities by the end of 2018. It makes it necessary to create a detailed and comprehensive study of this segment of economy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the sovereign domestic bond market in Ukraine, including both primary and secondary market. Research methods such as induction, deduction, bottom-up approach, synthesis, systematization, and statistical analysis are applied. The state of secondary bond market in Ukraine is determined. A poor devolvement level of secondary bond market can be explained by several factors. First, it is a relatively low volume of deals on the market, in comparison to primary market. Second, non-reliable information on secondary bond market operations, as some of them have negative or extremely high yield, presumably as a result of fraud and corruption schemes. Also, bond auctions issued by the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine on primary market have been analyzed. The data on primary bond market were structured by type of bonds, duration, and currency of loan. The weighted average of yield and term to maturity were calculated, according to the corresponding classification. Some assumptions about the causes of dynamics and trends in the primary bond market are made. As a result of the statistical analysis, conclusions about the reasons for the yield increase on domestic bonds in 2018 are made. Further research can be focused on expanding of the data analysis periods, including both preliminary and subsequent periods, to obtain extra confirmation of the assumptions that were made and to discover new patterns. Results of this paper can be applied for the development and improvement of fiscal policy to ensure the debt state security.Article received 25.04.2019

The CSPP at work: Yield heterogeneity and the portfolio rebalancing channel

We assess the impact of the corporate sector purchase programme (CSPP), the corporate arm of the ECB's quantitative easing, over its first year of activity (June 2016 – June 2017). Focusing on the primary bond market, we find evidence of a significant impact of the CSPP on yield spreads, both directly on purchased and targeted bonds and indirectly on all other bonds. The magnitude and the timing of the changes in yield spreads, coupled with the evolution of bond placements, are fully consistent with the proper unfolding the portfolio rebalancing channel.

The CSPP at Work - Yield Heterogeneity and the Portfolio Rebalancing Channel

We assess the impact of the corporate sector purchase programme (CSPP), the corporate arm of the ECB’s quantitative easing policy, in its first year of activity (June 2016 – May 2017). Focusing on the primary bond market, we find evidence of a significant impact of the CSPP on yield spreads, both directly on targeted bonds and indirectly via the portfolio rebalancing channel. While spreads on eligible bonds have declined since the start of the programme (by 60 basis points in 2016), non-eligible bonds remained unaffected until 2017, when the entire corporate market recorded a further decline in spreads of 56 basis points.

Impact of declining interest rates on European primary bond market

The aim of this paper is to examine the growing popularity of debt financing in European based subjects. The development of issued volume was examined on the sample of 9,293 public debt offerings denominated in EUR issued between 30th November 2007 and 30th November 2016 and the impact of declining market interest rates on primary bond market was explored. More than 7.666 trillion EUR of debt were analyzed and the results indicate that despite low interest rates, the volume of issued bonds does not increase over time. Decline of interest rates only compensates slow economic growth as well as increasing global market and political risks.

The CSPP at Work: Yield Heterogeneity and the Portfolio Rebalancing Channel

We assess the impact of the corporate sector purchase programme (CSPP), the corporate arm of the ECB’s quantitative easing policy, in its first year of activity (June 2016 – May 2017). Focusing on the primary bond market, we find evidence of a significant impact of the CSPP on yield spreads, both directly on targeted bonds and indirectly via the portfolio rebalancing channel. While spreads on eligible bonds have declined since the start of the programme (by 60 basis points in 2016), non-eligible bonds remained unaffected until 2017, when the entire corporate market recorded a further decline in spreads of 56 basis points.

Long-Term Bank Funding Cost: Does Sovereign Matter?

We analyze the long-term funding costs faced by banks from US, UK and euro-area on the international bond market with a focus on the value of implicit and explicit public guarantees. By looking at the risk-premia at issuance on 5,500 bonds, we find that: i) both explicit guarantees as well as sovereign creditworthiness have a substantial effect on the cost of bonds; ii) large institutions enjoy lower issuance costs, most likely due to the too-big-to-fail safety net; iii) since the onset of the global financial crisis, systemic banks (the so called G-SIFIs) underwent an enhanced market discipline paying an additional premium on new bond issuances. In particular, we show that non AAA-rated governments add a burden to the cost of debt issuance by the domestic banking system. This implicit negative support intensified in the most acute phase of the euro-area sovereign debt crisis: we estimate that the absence of the backing of an AAA-rated government amounted, ceteris paribus, to an average increase of 150bp in the cost paid by banks when issuing unsecured bonds in 2011. However, once we restrict the sample to banks for which CDS spreads are priced in the market – usually larger institutions which are more involved in the issuance activity – we find that the bond premium reflects more closely the characteristics of each institution (soundness and creditworthiness), with the role of government somewhat reduced. By distinguishing between banks’ absolute size and systemic relevance, we find that financial investors were able to disentangle the two issues. Or results suggest that the larger the magnitude of the balance sheet the lower the premium paid at launch on bonds, which in turn suggests that the safety net benefits granted to too-big-to-fail institutions encompass also lower funding costs on the primary bond market. At the same time, we find that there are matters of concern regarding the systemic relevance of financial institutions: their involvement in complex derivative trades and their business model have made them less transparent and less easy to price. In this respect we find evidence of enhanced market discipline: since the onset of the global financial crisis systemically important banks – which before the crisis were enjoying a reduction in the spread – paid, ceteris paribus, a larger premium of around 50 basis points on their bond issuance.

Debt Analysts' Views of Debt-Equity Conflicts of Interest

ABSTRACTWe investigate how the tone of sell-side debt analysts' discussions about debt-equity conflict events affects the informativeness of debt analysts' reports in debt markets. Conflict events such as mergers and acquisitions, debt issuance, share repurchases, or dividend payments potentially generate asset substitution or wealth expropriation by equity holders. We document that debt analysts routinely discuss these conflict events in their reports. More importantly, discussions about conflict events that we code as negative are associated with increases in credit spreads and bond trading volume. Consistent with the informational value of debt analysts' discussions in secondary debt markets, we find that negatively coded conflict discussions predict higher bond offering yields in the primary bond market. In additional analyses, we measure the tone of debt analysts' discussions based on their disagreement with the tone of equity analysts' discussions and find that the informativeness of debt analysts' reports is higher when our coding indicates that conflict events are viewed negatively by debt analysts but positively by equity analysts.JEL Classifications: G12, G14, G32, M49.

Debt Analysts’ Views of Debt-Equity Conflicts of Interest

We investigate how the tone of sell-side debt analysts’ discussions about debt-equity conflict events affects the informativeness of debt analysts’ reports in debt markets. Conflict events such as mergers and acquisitions, debt issuance, share repurchases, or dividend payments potentially generate asset substitution or wealth expropriation by equity holders. We document that debt analysts routinely discuss these conflict events in their reports. More importantly, discussions about conflict events that we code as negative are associated with increases in credit spreads and bond trading volume. Consistent with the informational value of debt analysts’ discussions in secondary debt markets, we find that negatively coded conflict discussions predict higher bond offering yields in the primary bond market. In additional analyses, we measure the tone of debt analysts’ discussions based on their disagreement with the tone of equity analysts’ discussions and find that the informativeness of debt analysts’ reports is higher when our coding indicates that conflict events are viewed negatively by debt analysts but positively by equity analysts.

With good reputation size does not matter: issue frequency and the determinants of debt maturity

This article examines empirically the effect firm reputation has on the determinants of debt maturity. Utilizing data from European primary bond market between 1999 and 2005, I find that reputation is a determinant of the maturity of newly issued debt, where firms of high or low reputation issue short-term debt and firms of mediocre reputation issue long-term debt. Thus, reputation appears to mimic a nonmonotonic relationship between credit quality and maturity. The annualized coupon payments are shown to be a significant factor in determining the debt maturity and reveal a monotonously increasing relationship between credit quality and debt maturity once controlled for. Finally, I show that issuers lacking a credit rating have an implied credit quality positioned between Investment Grade (IG) and Speculative Grade (SG) debt.

Real Earnings Management and Cost of Debt

We examine the association between real earnings management (REM) and the cost of new corporate bond issues. Three types of REM are considered: sales manipulation, overproduction and abnormal reduction of discretionary expenditures. Using the sample from 1993 to 2004, we find that cost of debt is negatively related to the proxies for sales manipulation, abnormal reduction of discretionary expenses and the overall REM for firms without using stock options to compensate their managers. These results suggest that bondholders perceive REM as evidence of operational efficiency and thus offer favorable pricing terms to firms with REM. When managerial compensation is linked to option awards, however, bondholders do not price REM. Overproduction does not show a significant effect on bond yield spread. Overall, these results imply that, in the primary bond market, bondholders do not see through REM, especially for firms that do not have executive stock option plans.

Municipal financial reporting and the general obligation bond market: New York City, 1961–1975

This study addresses the value of municipal accounting information to the municipal bond market by examining the association between New York City (City) bond yields and published accounting data in comparison to the association between City yields and accounting data which have been adjusted to conform to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The report of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation that followed New York City's default in 1975 (SEC 1977) charged that the City's (non-GAAP) financial statements obscured the City's true financial condition and misled statement users, including general obligation bond investors. The results of my study indicate that whereas New York City's accounting practices significantly overstated revenues and understated expenditures, the primary bond market's assessment of the relative risk of the City's general obligation bonds was consistent with the adjusted (GAAP) revenue and expenditure numbers which were not disclosed in the City's financial statements.