In Safe Hands: The Financial and Real Impact of Investor Composition over the Credit Cycle

Antonio Coppola

The Review of Financial Studies, 2025, vol. 38, issue 8, 2275-2325

Abstract: I show that investor composition affects bond price dynamics and capital allocation during crises. Using large-scale holdings data and within-firm ownership variation across near-identical bonds, I causally identify bond returns’ investor composition elasticities. Corporate bonds held predominantly by insurers rather than mutual funds suffer milder losses in downturns: increasing insurer holdings by half a bond’s size causes 20% shallower drawdowns. A shift-share instrument isolates variation from large insurers’ idiosyncratic primary-market allocations. Differences in intermediaries’ liability structures drive these results, which hold across countries. During crises, firms with more stable bondholders maintain higher borrowing at lower cost and invest more.

Keywords: G00; G12; G23; G30; E22; E30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhaf017 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:38:y:2025:i:8:p:2275-2325.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().