This paper investigates execution quality issues in corporate bond trading. Using an extensive sample of bond trades by insurance companies, we find that an insurance company entering a trade of similar size and on the same side for the same bond on the same day with the same dealer will receive...

Taking advantage of recently augmented corporate bond transaction data, we examine the pricing implications of informed trading in corporate bonds and its ability to predict corporate defaults. We find that microstructure measures of information asymmetry seem to capture adverse selection in...

This paper examines the information contents of trading activities in the corporate bond market prior to earnings announcements. We find that the direction of pre-announcement bond trading is significantly related to earnings surprises. Such linkage is most evident prior to negative news and in...

Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire-sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of...

We examine the microstructure of liquidity provision in the COVID-19 corporate bond liquidity crisis. During the two weeks leading to Fed interventions, transaction costs soared, trade-size pricing inverted, and dealers, in particular non-primary dealers, shifted from buying to selling, causing...

Technology transformed the trading of financial assets but has been slower to come to corporate bond trading. Combining proprietary data from MarketAxess with regulatory TRACE data, we investigate how electronic request for quote (RFQ) trading affects bond dealers and trading more generally. We...

The Covid-19 pandemic led to acute stress in the global economy and, as a consequence, many parts of the global financial system. In the U.S., when concerns over the coronavirus escalated in March, many financial markets were hit by extraordinary selling pressure