We establish key stylized facts about the post-crisis evolution of trading and pricing of credit default swaps. Using supervisory contract-level data, we document that dealers become net buyers of credit protection starting in the second half of 2014, both through reducing the amount of...

Most mortgages in the U.S. are securitized in agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Yield spreads on these securities are thus a key determinant of homeowners' funding costs. We study variation in MBS spreads over time and across securities, and document a cross-sectional smile pattern in MBS...

We evaluate the impact of the Federal Reserve corporate credit facilities (PMCCF and SMCCF). A third of the positive effect on prices and liquidity occurred on the announcement date. We document immediate pass-through into primary markets, particularly for eligible issuers. Improvements continue...

We study how the risks to future liquidity flow across corporate bond, Treasury, and stock markets. We document distribution “flight-to-safety” effects: a deterioration in the liquidity of high-yield corporate bonds forecasts an increase in the average liquidity of Treasury securities and a...

Faced with the problem of pricing complex contingent claims, an investor seeks to make her valuations robust to model uncertainty. We construct a notion of a model-uncertainty-induced preference functional and extend the "No Good Deals" methodology of Cochrane and Sa a-Requejo (2000) to compute...

This paper considers the problem of information acquisition in an intermediated market, where the specialists have access to superior technology for acquiring information. These informational advantages of specialists relative to households lead to disagreement between the two groups, changing...

The Federal Reserve introduced the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF) and the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF) in response to the severe disruptions in corporate bond markets triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic shutdowns. The Corporate...

The Federal Reserve reestablished the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF 2020) in response to the disruptions in the commercial paper market triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic shutdowns. The CPFF 2020 was designed to support market functioning and provide a liquidity...

We propose the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI) to quantify corporate bond market dislocations in real time. The index takes a preponderance-of-metrics perspective to combine a broad set of measures of market functioning from primary and secondary markets but not driven by any one...