Pricing Corporate Bonds with Credit Risk, Liquidity Risk, and Their Correlation

Abstract

This paper proposes a generalized bond pricing model, accounting for all the effects of credit risk, liquidity risk, and their correlation. We use an informed trading model to specify the bond liquidity payoff and analyze the sources of liquidity risk. We show that liquidity risk arises from reduced information accuracy and market risk tolerance, and it is market risk tolerance that links credit and liquidity. Then, we extend the traditional bond pricing model with only credit risk by incorporating liquidity risk into the framework in which the probabilities of the two risk events are estimated by a joint distribution. Using numerical examples, we analyze the role of the correlation between credit and liquidity in bond pricing, especially during a financial crisis. We document that the varying correlation between default and illiquidity explains the phenomenon of bond death spiral observed in a financial crisis. Finally, we take the US corporate bond market as an example to demonstrate our conclusions.