Common Risk Factors in the Cross-Section of Corporate Bond Returns
Journal of Financial Economics, Forthcoming
HKUST Finance Symposium 2016: Active Investing and Arbitrage Capital
75 Pages Posted: 3 Oct 2016 Last revised: 12 Feb 2018
Date Written: February 2018
Abstract
We investigate the cross-sectional determinants of corporate bond returns and find that downside risk is the strongest predictor of future bond returns. We also introduce common risk factors based on the prevalent risk characteristics of corporate bonds -- downside risk, credit risk, and liquidity risk -- and find that these novel bond factors have economically and statistically significant risk premia that cannot be explained by long-established stock and bond market factors. We show that the newly proposed risk factors outperform all other models considered in the literature in explaining the returns of the industry- and size/maturity-sorted portfolios of corporate bonds.
Keywords: corporate bond, risk factors, downside risk, credit risk, liquidity risk
JEL Classification: G10, G11, C13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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