We identify a novel and common exogenous demand shock caused by passive funds in the corporate bond market. Specifically, passive fund demand for corporate bonds displays discontinuity around the maturity cutoffs separating long-term, intermediate-term, and short-term bonds and increases significantly upon a bond's crossing of 10-, 5-, and 3-year time-to-maturity cutoffs. We develop a novel identification strategy to study the impact of passive fund demand in the corporate bond market. First, we find that these non-fundamental demand shifts lead to a significant and lasting decrease in yield spreads, as well as persistent liquidity improvements. Second, passive fund demand shocks spill over to the primary market, causing lower issuing yield spreads, and firms engaging in debt market timing by substituting expensive bank debt with cheaper bond financing. We provide causal evidence that non-fundamental demand shocks can have real effects in that constrained firms use issuance proceeds to fund investment. Our findings inform the ongoing debate about the regulatory treatment of cross-trades between funds by the SEC.

Analyzing 563 trillion possible models, we find that the majority of tradable factors designed to price bond markets are unlikely sources of priced risk, and only one novel tradable bond factor, capturing the bond post-earnings announcement drift, should be included in the stochastic discount factor (SDF) with very high probability. Nevertheless, the SDF is dense in the space of observable factors, with both nontradable and equity-based ones being salient for pricing corporate bonds. A Bayesian model averaging–SDF explains corporate risk premia better than all existing models, both in- and out-of-sample, and captures business cycle and market crash risks

Intermediation capacity varies across dealers, and as a result, misallocation of credit risk reduces the risk-bearing capacity of the dealer sector and increases effective market-level risk aversion. When the efficient reallocation of credit risk within the dealer sector is impaired, interdealer price dispersion increases. Empirically, when interdealer price dispersion increases, bond prices decrease. Interdealer price dispersion explains a substantial portion of bond yield spread changes, the cross-section of bond returns, and the changes in the basis between bond spread and fair-value spreads. We conclude interdealer frictions reduce the risk-bearing capacity of intermediaries and are crucial for intermediary bond pricing.