EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

CDS-bond basis and bond return predictability

Gi H. Kim, Haitao Li and Weina Zhang

Journal of Empirical Finance, 2016, vol. 38, issue PA, 307-337

Abstract: We examine the predictive power of the CDS-bond basis for future corporate bond returns. We find that residual basis, the part of the CDS-bond basis that cannot be explained by a wide range of market frictions such as counterparty risk, funding risk, and liquidity risk, strongly negatively predicts excess returns. Controlling for systematic risk factors, including credit risk and liquidity risk, we find that a bond portfolio formed on the residual basis generates a significant abnormal bond return of 1.79% at the 20-day horizon. The abnormal returns due to the residual basis reflect mispricing rather than missing systematic risk factors. These results are robust to different horizons and sample periods and to the various characteristics of bonds. Overall, our results imply a beneficial role of CDS in the bond market as the existence of mispricing between CDS and bonds results in a subsequent price convergence in bonds.

Keywords: Credit default swaps; CDS-bond basis; Basis arbitrage; Corporate bonds; Financial crisis; Limits of arbitrage; Return predictability; Price convergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G10 G12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927539816300706
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:empfin:v:38:y:2016:i:pa:p:307-337

DOI: 10.1016/j.jempfin.2016.07.006

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Empirical Finance is currently edited by R. T. Baillie, F. C. Palm, Th. J. Vermaelen and C. C. P. Wolff

More articles in Journal of Empirical Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:empfin:v:38:y:2016:i:pa:p:307-337