Essays On The Market For Corporate Bonds PDF Download

This thesis consists of three essays, which examine several issues in over-the-counter financial markets. The first essay shows that dealers build socially excessive inventories in order to compete for market share. The distortion in pricing is empirically identified using transaction level data in the U.S. corporate bond market. The second essay shows that the two roles of a dealer, immediacy provision and matchmaking, create a conflict of interest. A direct implication is that bid-ask spread is a misleading measure of immediacy provision. The third essay introduces reducible intermediation chains in order to quantitatively measure search frictions in over-the-counter markets. This allows us to categorize intermediation chains by their primary intermediation incentives. Specifically, the first essay shows that dealers in over-the-counter markets build socially excessive inventories in order to compete for market share and get the associated intermediation rents. Using the TRACE dataset for the U.S. corporate bond market, I find that, excluding the crisis, the incentive to build inventory raises dealers' bid prices for corporate bonds by an average of 5 basis points. During the crisis, this effect was reversed by 23 basis points of implied additional dealer balance-sheet costs. The second essay, co-authored with Zeyu Zheng, shows that the two roles of a dealer, immediacy provision and matchmaking, create a conflict of interest that leads dealers to hold inefficiently high levels of inventory in order to extract additional rents from customers. Because of this, bid-ask spread is a misleading measure of immediacy provision. Our model suggests the use of execution delays as an additional measure of immediacy provision. The third essay, co-authored with Yang Song and Xingtan Zhang, introduces reducible intermediation chains in order to quantitatively measure search frictions in over-the-counter markets. This allows us to categorize intermediation chains by their primary intermediation incentives. Using interdealer trades in the U.S. corporate bond market, we discover new types of intermediation chains that are not formed to mitigate search frictions or to facilitate liquidity provision. Instead, these chains arise when dealers intermediate trades for other dealers in order to unwind positions at a profit.