We examine the microstructure of liquidity provision in the COVID-19 corporate bond
liquidity crisis. During the two weeks leading up to Federal Reserve System interventions …

We study a global panel of green and conventional corporate bonds to assess the borrowing
cost advantage at issuance for green bond issuers. We find that, on average, green …

Technology transformed the trading of financial assets but has been slower to come to
corporate bond trading. Combining proprietary data from MarketAxess with regulatory …

The difference between corporate bond yields at issuance and in secondary markets, the
“issuance premium”, spikes in bad times, increasing firms' costs of capital. Leveraging new …

Mandated post-trade transparency in secondary markets lowers the cost of issuing corporate
bonds. We show that costs are lower due to the mitigation of information asymmetry in the …

Bond underwriters, lacking “Greenshoe options” and formal systems to track “flipping”
activity, have fewer tools than equity underwriters to manage secondary market order flow …

We examine the role of insurance companies as value investors in the corporate bond
market. We show that during the COVID-19 liquidity crisis, insurers acted as “buyers of last …

Institutional ownership of corporate bonds is highly concentrated. The largest five
bondholders hold at least 40.4% of the amount outstanding of the average bond issue …

This dissertation consists of three independent chapters in financial economics. Chapter 1
studies the dynamics of US corporate bond credit spreads. Post-2008, corporate bond credit …

Post-2008, corporate bond credit spreads increase when long-term interest rates fall,
particularly for lower-rated bonds. This is true unconditionally but also conditional on …