IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ime/imedps/18-e-14.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Scarcity and Spotlight Effects on Liquidity and Yield: Quantitative Easing in Japan

Author

Listed:
  • Loriana Pelizzon

    (SAFE Goethe University Frankfurt and Ca'Foscari University of Venice (pelizzon@safe.uni-frankfurt.de))

  • Marti G. Subrahmanyam

    (Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University (msubrahm@stern.nyu.edu))

  • Reiko Tobe

    (Waseda University (r.tobe@aoni.waseda.jp))

  • Jun Uno

    (Waseda University (juno@waseda.jp))

Abstract

We investigate the determinants of the term structures of market liquidity and bond yield in the case of the Quantitative Easing ( QE) programs implemented by the Bank of Japan (BoJ). We distinguish between two opposing effects of QE on the liquidity of Japanese Government Bonds, the "scarcity effect," which is gradually manifested as a negative impact on liquidity, due to the shrinkage in the available supply of bonds; and the "spotlight effect," which induces an immediate improvement in liquidity, reflecting BOJ's massive demand. Between 2011 and 2016, we find that government bonds show an improvement in liquidity through the spotlight effect, but also experience a deterioration in liquidity through the scarcity effect. As for the yield, both the spotlight and scarcity effects work in the same direction (i.e., they raise bond prices) against theoretical expectation. Illiquidity caused by scarcity amplifies the yield decline rather than adding to the illiquidity premium.

Suggested Citation

  • Loriana Pelizzon & Marti G. Subrahmanyam & Reiko Tobe & Jun Uno, 2018. "Scarcity and Spotlight Effects on Liquidity and Yield: Quantitative Easing in Japan," IMES Discussion Paper Series 18-E-14, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan.
    • Handle: RePEc:ime:imedps:18-e-14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.imes.boj.or.jp/research/papers/english/18-E-14.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stefania D’Amico & William English & David López‐Salido & Edward Nelson, 2012. "The Federal Reserve's Large‐scale Asset Purchase Programmes: Rationale and Effects," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 122(564), pages 415-446, November.
    2. Ichiro Fukunaga & Naoya Kato & Junko Koeda, 2015. "Maturity Structure and Supply Factors in Japanese Government Bond Markets," Monetary and Economic Studies, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan, vol. 33, pages 45-96, November.
    3. A. Colin Cameron & Jonah B. Gelbach & Douglas L. Miller, 2011. "Robust Inference With Multiway Clustering," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(2), pages 238-249, April.
    4. Goyenko, Ruslan & Subrahmanyam, Avanidhar & Ukhov, Andrey, 2011. "The Term Structure of Bond Market Liquidity and Its Implications for Expected Bond Returns," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 46(1), pages 111-139, February.
    5. Kazuo Ueda, 2013. "Response of Asset Prices to Monetary Policy under Abenomics," Asian Economic Policy Review, Japan Center for Economic Research, vol. 8(2), pages 252-269, December.
    6. Robin Greenwood & Dimitri Vayanos, 2014. "Bond Supply and Excess Bond Returns," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 27(3), pages 663-713.
    7. Blattner, Tobias Sebastian & Joyce, Michael A. S., 2016. "Net debt supply shocks in the euro area and the implications for QE," Working Paper Series 1957, European Central Bank.
    8. D’Amico, Stefania & King, Thomas B., 2013. "Flow and stock effects of large-scale treasury purchases: Evidence on the importance of local supply," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(2), pages 425-448.
    9. Friewald, Nils & Jankowitsch, Rainer & Subrahmanyam, Marti G., 2012. "Illiquidity or credit deterioration: A study of liquidity in the US corporate bond market during financial crises," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(1), pages 18-36.
    10. Stoll, Hans R, 1978. "The Supply of Dealer Services in Securities Markets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 33(4), pages 1133-1151, September.
    11. Kentaro Iwatsubo & Tomoki Taishi, 2018. "Quantitative Easing and Liquidity in the Japanese Government Bond Market," International Review of Finance, International Review of Finance Ltd., vol. 18(3), pages 463-475, September.
    12. Michael A.S. Joyce & Matthew Tong, 2012. "QE and the Gilt Market: a Disaggregated Analysis," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 122(564), pages 348-384, November.
    13. Kathi Schlepper & Heiko Hofer & Ryan Riordan & Andreas Schrimpf, 2017. "Scarcity effects of QE: A transaction-level analysis in the Bund market," BIS Working Papers 625, Bank for International Settlements.
    14. Boudoukh, Jacob & Whitelaw, Robert F, 1993. "Liquidity as a Choice Variable: A Lesson from the Japanese Government Bond Market," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 6(2), pages 265-292.
    15. Robin Greenwood & Dimitri Vayanos, 2010. "Price Pressure in the Government Bond Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(2), pages 585-590, May.
    16. Amihud, Yakov & Mendelson, Haim, 1986. "Asset pricing and the bid-ask spread," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(2), pages 223-249, December.
    17. Harris, Lawrence E & Gurel, Eitan, 1986. "Price and Volume Effects Associated with Changes in the S&P 500 List: New Evidence for the Existence of Price Pressures," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(4), pages 815-829, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Hattori, Takahiro, 2021. "Noise as a liquidity measure: Evidence from the JGB market," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    2. Hattori, Takahiro, 2019. "Do liquidity enhancement auctions improve the market liquidity in the JGB market?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 183(C), pages 1-1.
    3. Blix Grimaldi, Marianna & Crosta, Alberto & Zhang, Dong, 2021. "The Liquidity of the Government Bond Market – What Impact Does Quantitative Easing Have? Evidence from Sweden," Working Paper Series 402, Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden).
    4. Boneva, L. & Elliott, D. & Kaminska, I. & Linton, O. & McLaren, N. & Morley, B., 2019. "The Impact of Corporate QE on Liquidity: Evidence from the UK," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1937, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    5. Boneva, Lena & Islami, Mevlud & Schlepper, Kathi, 2021. "Liquidity in the German corporate bond market: Has the CSPP made a difference?," Discussion Papers 08/2021, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    6. Christensen, Jens H.E. & Gillan, James M., 2022. "Does quantitative easing affect market liquidity?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 134(C).
    7. Nao Sudo & Masaki Tanaka, 2018. "Do Market Segmentation and Preferred Habitat Theories Hold in Japan? : Quantifying Stock and Flow Effects of Bond Purchases," Bank of Japan Working Paper Series 18-E-16, Bank of Japan.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Martijn Boermans & Viacheslav Keshkov, 2018. "The impact of the ECB asset purchases on the European bond market structure: Granular evidence on ownership concentration," DNB Working Papers 590, Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department.
    2. De Santis, Roberto A. & Holm-Hadulla, Fédéric, 2017. "Flow effects of central bank asset purchases on euro area sovereign bond yields: evidence from a natural experiment," Working Paper Series 2052, European Central Bank.
    3. Christoph Trebesch & Jeromin Zettelmeyer, 2018. "ECB Interventions in Distressed Sovereign Debt Markets: The Case of Greek Bonds," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 66(2), pages 287-332, June.
    4. Michael E. Cahill & Stefania D'Amico & Canlin Li & John S. Sears, 2013. "Duration risk versus local supply channel in Treasury yields: evidence from the Federal Reserve's asset purchase announcements," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2013-35, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    5. Jacob Boudoukh & Jordan Brooks & Matthew Richardson & Zhikai Xu, 2016. "The Complexity of Liquidity: The Extraordinary Case of Sovereign Bonds," NBER Working Papers 22576, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Eser, Fabian & Lemke, Wolfgang & Nyholm, Ken & Radde, Sören & Vladu, Andreea Liliana, 2019. "Tracing the impact of the ECB’s asset purchase programme on the yield curve," Working Paper Series 2293, European Central Bank.
    7. Driessen, Joost & Nijman, Theodore E. & Simon, Zorka, 2018. "Much ado about nothing: A study of differential pricing and liquidity of short and long term bonds," SAFE Working Paper Series 238, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    8. Schlepper, Kathi & Riordan, Ryan & Hofer, Heiko & Schrimpf, Andreas, 2017. "Scarcity effects of QE: A transaction-level analysis in the Bund market," Discussion Papers 06/2017, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    9. Lemke, Wolfgang & Werner, Thomas, 2020. "Dissecting long-term Bund yields in the run-up to the ECB’s public sector purchase programme," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    10. De Santis, Roberto A., 2020. "Impact of the Asset Purchase Programme on euro area government bond yields using market news," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 192-209.
    11. Vayanos, Dimitri & Wang, Jiang, 2013. "Market Liquidity—Theory and Empirical Evidence ," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1289-1361, Elsevier.
    12. Joseph E. Gagnon, 2016. "Quantitative Easing: An Underappreciated Success," Policy Briefs PB16-4, Peterson Institute for International Economics.
    13. Schuster, Philipp & Uhrig-Homburg, Marliese, 2012. "The term structure of bond market liquidity conditional on the economic environment: An analysis of government guaranteed bonds," Working Paper Series in Economics 45, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Department of Economics and Management.
    14. W. Arrata & B. Nguyen, 2017. "Price impact of bond supply shocks: Evidence from the Eurosystem's asset purchase program," Working papers 623, Banque de France.
    15. Simon Gilchrist & Egon Zakrajšek, 2013. "The Impact of the Federal Reserve's Large‐Scale Asset Purchase Programs on Corporate Credit Risk," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 45(s2), pages 29-57, December.
    16. Rostagno, Massimo & Altavilla, Carlo & Carboni, Giacomo & Lemke, Wolfgang & Motto, Roberto & Saint Guilhem, Arthur & Yiangou, Jonathan, 2019. "A tale of two decades: the ECB’s monetary policy at 20," Working Paper Series 2346, European Central Bank.
    17. Maciej Stefański, 2021. "Macroeconomic Effects of Quantitative Easing Using Mid-sized Bayesian Vector Autoregressions," Working Papers 2021-068, Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of Economic Analysis.
    18. Martijn Boermans & Robert Vermeulen, 2018. "Quantitative easing and preferred habitat investors in the euro area bond market," DNB Working Papers 586, Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department.
    19. Dulani Seneviratne & Mr. Fei Han, 2018. "Scarcity Effects of Quantitative Easing on Market Liquidity: Evidence from the Japanese Government Bond Market," IMF Working Papers 2018/096, International Monetary Fund.
    20. Iryna Kaminska & Gabriele Zinna, 2020. "Official Demand for U.S. Debt: Implications for U.S. Real Rates," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 52(2-3), pages 323-364, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Sovereign Bonds; Quantitative Easing; Market Liquidity; Scarcity; Spotlight;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C54 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Quantitative Policy Modeling
    • E43 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:ime:imedps:18-e-14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: . General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imegvjp.html .

    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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Kinken (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imegvjp.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.