Flighty liquidity

We study the conditional distribution of future liquidity in the secondary market for corporate bonds as a function of current liquidity. Increases in liquidity are persistent for investment-grade bonds and flighty for high-yield bonds. Greater liquidity of high-yield bonds is associated with lower uncertainty about future liquidity of investment-grade bonds, but greater liquidity of investment-grade bonds is associated with greater uncertainty about future liquidity of high-yield bonds. Finally, we show that measures of market-wide volatility and market-maker constraints do not contain information useful for predicting the distribution of future liquidity over and above that contained in the recent history of bid-ask spreads.