Passive Demand and Active Supply: Evidence from Maturity-Mandated Corporate Bond Funds

Lorenzo Bretscher, Lukas Schmid and Tiange Ye
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Lorenzo Bretscher: University of Lausanne; Swiss Finance Institute; and Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
Lukas Schmid: University of Southern California
Tiange Ye: University of Southern California

No 23-42, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute

Abstract: We identify a novel and common exogenous demand shock caused by passive funds in the corporate bond market. Specifically, passive fund demand for corporate bonds displays discontinuity around the maturity cutoffs separating long-term, intermediate-term, and short-term bonds. Passive funds' demand increases significantly upon a bond's crossing of 10-, 5-, and 3-year time-to-maturity cutoffs. We develop a novel identification strategy to study the impact of passive fund demand in the corporate bond market. First, we find that these non-fundamental demand shifts lead to a significant and lasting decrease in yield spreads, as well as persistent liquidity improvements. Second, we find that passive fund demand shocks spill over to the primary market, causing lower issuing yield spreads and actively higher net debt issuance, thereby impacting firms' financing and investment activities.

Keywords: demand shifts; passive funds; corporate bonds; demand elasticity; ETFs; mutual funds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 78 pages
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fmk
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp2342

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