Amsterdam TI Finance Research Seminars

Speaker(s)
Zhiguo He (University of Chicago)
Date
2012-12-05
Location
Amsterdam

This paper studies the interaction between fundamental and liquidity for defaultable corporate bonds that are traded in an over-the-counter secondary market with search frictions. Bargaining with dealers determines a bond’s endogenous liquidity, which depends on both the firm fundamental and the time-to-maturity of the bond. Corporate default decisions interact with the endogenous secondary market liquidity via the rollover channel. A default-liquidity loop arises: Earlier endogenous default worsens a bond’s secondary market liquidity, which amplifies equity holders’ rollover losses, which in turn leads to earlier endogenous default. Besides characterizing in closed form the full inter-dependence between liquidity premium and default premium for credit spreads, we also study the optimal maturity implied by the model based on the tradeoff between liquidity provision and inefficient default.