IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fednls/86806.html

The Private Premium in Public Bonds?

Author

Abstract

In a 2012 New York Fed study, Chenyang Wei and I find that interest rate spreads on publicly traded bonds issued by companies with privately traded equity are about 31 basis points higher on average than spreads on bonds issued by companies with publicly traded equity, even after controlling for risk and other factors. These differences are economically and statistically significant and they persist in the secondary market. We control for many factors associated with bond pricing, including risk, liquidity, and covenants. Although these controls account for some of the absolute pricing difference, the price wedge between public and private companies remains. Despite these pricing differences, private companies with public bonds are no more likely to go bankrupt or to be downgraded than are similar public companies. In this post, we briefly summarize the findings of our study.

Suggested Citation

  • Anna Kovner & Chenyang Wei, 2012. "The Private Premium in Public Bonds?," Liberty Street Economics 20120516, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fednls:86806
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012/05/the-private-premium-in-public-bonds.html
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lewis Liu, 2025. "Examining the cost of debt and bond spreads: public vs. private firms in China," Journal of Economics and Finance, Springer;Academy of Economics and Finance, vol. 49(1), pages 1-22, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fednls:86806. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gabriella Bucciarelli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbnyus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.