Sentiment and Corporate Bond Valuations Before and After the Onset of the Credit Crisis

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 Last revised: 22 May 2019

See all articles by Jing-Zhi Huang

Jing-Zhi Huang

Pennsylvania State University - University Park - Department of Finance

Marco Rossi

Texas A&M

Yuan Wang

Concordia University, Quebec

Date Written: January 12, 2015

Abstract

This paper studies how stock market sentiment impacts corporate bond valuations. Using bond transactions from the Trading and Compliance Engine (TRACE), we find that sentiment is negatively related to bond yield spreads, with the impact being stronger after the onset of the recent credit crisis. After the crisis, the variation in sentiment also helps explain the extent to which the corporate bond market and the equity market are integrated. Our conditional analysis reveals that the negative effect of sentiment on yields is stronger when fundamental risk and liquidity frictions are higher pointing to a direct role of sentiment in the bond market whereby rational bond investors are unable in these high risk/high frictions scenarios to correct the mispricing generated by other bond investors. We also find that the sentiment effect is stronger when the returns to capital structure arbitrage are higher, suggesting that sentiment also spills over to the bond market through the activity of investors dedicated to correcting relative stock and bond value mispricings within the same firm.

Keywords: sentiment, credit crisis, equity/bond market integration

Suggested Citation

Huang, Jing-Zhi Jay and Rossi, Marco and Wang, Yuan, Sentiment and Corporate Bond Valuations Before and After the Onset of the Credit Crisis (January 12, 2015). Journal of Fixed Income, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2298491 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2298491

Jing-Zhi Jay Huang

Pennsylvania State University - University Park - Department of Finance ( email )

University Park, PA 16802
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.personal.psu.edu/jxh56

Marco Rossi

Texas A&M ( email )

360S Wehner
College Station, TX 77843-4218
United States

HOME PAGE: http://https://mays.tamu.edu/directory/mrossi/

Yuan Wang (Contact Author)

Concordia University, Quebec ( email )

1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, Quebec H3G 1MB
Canada

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