The Federal Reserve uses (reverse) auctions to implement its purchases of Treasury bonds in quantitative easing (QE). To evaluate dealers’ offers across multiple bonds, the Fed relies on its internal yield curve model, fitted to secondary market bond prices. From November 2010 to September 2011, a one standard deviation increase in the cheapness of a Treasury bond (how much the market price of the bond is below a model-implied value) increases the Fed’s purchase quantity of that bond by 276 million and increases the auction costs on that bond by 2.6 cents per $100 par value, controlling for standard covariates. Our results suggest that the Fed harvests gains from trades by purchasing undervalued bonds, but strategic dealers extract some profits because the Fed’s relative values can be partly inferred from price data.

This paper investigates how dealers’ trading relations shape their trading behavior in the corporate bond market. Dealers charge lower spreads to dealers with whom they have the strongest ties and more so during periods of market turmoil. Systemically important dealers exploit their connections at the expense of peripheral dealers as well as clients, charging higher markups than to other core dealers. Also, intermediation chains lengthened by 20% following the collapse of a flagship dealer in 2008 and even more for institutions strongly connected to this dealer. Finally, dealers drastically reduced their inventory during the crisis.

We examine the introduction of mandatory post-trade reporting in the To-Be-Announced mortgage-backed securities market. With post-trade reporting, trading costs fell for institutional investors. Trading costs declined more for investors’ trades with peripheral dealers than for their trades with core dealers. Peripheral dealers’ market share dropped after the introduction of post-trade reporting, suggesting that opacity was protecting inefficient high-cost dealers. Interdealer trades and volume declined as transparency made it easier to find natural counterparties. Relationships between dealers became less important and, after controlling for the number of trades, dealers used more counterparties in interdealer trades.

Measured as yield spreads against Treasury securities and AAA corporate bonds, the convenience premium of newly issued agency MBS averages more than half of the long-term Treasury convenience premium. The agency MBS convenience premium and issuance amount vary negatively with mortgage rate, consistent with a prepayment-driven channel. Placing agencies into conservatorship in 2008 and introducing liquidity regulations in 2013 significantly affected MBS convenience premium, consistent with government guarantee and regulatory treatment channels. Analyses of dispersion of dealers’ prepayment forecasts, seasoned MBS, and investors’ MBS holdings deliver further economic implications for agency MBS as safe assets.

Many of the Federal Reserve’s (the Fed’s) monetary policy operations involve trading with primary dealers. We find that, for agency MBS, dealers charge 2.5 cents (per $100 face value) higher selling to the Fed than to non-Fed customers. Controlling for the same dealer, same security, and same trading time, this discriminatory pricing likely arises from dealers’ market power rather than inventory costs. Further, matching trade size reduces the price differential by more than half, implying that dealers’ market power greatly relates to the Fed’s purchases in large amounts, whereas the Fed’s limited breadth of counterparty choice also plays some role.

Two intermediary-based factors—a corporate bond dealer inventory measure and a broad intermediary distress measure—explain more than 40% of the puzzling common variation in credit spread changes beyond canonical structural factors. A simple intermediary-based model with partial market segmentation accounts for intermediary factors’ explanatory power and delivers three further implications with empirical support. First, whereas bond sorts on risk-related variables produce monotonic loading patterns on intermediary factors, non-risk-related sorts produce no pattern. Second, dealer inventory comoves with corporate-credit assets only, whereas intermediary distress comoves with both corporate-credit and non-corporate-credit assets. Third, dealers’ inventory responds to (instrumented) bond sales by institutional investors.

We find hedge funds that have higher return covariation with a disaster concern index, which we develop through out-of-the-money puts on various economic sector indices, earn significantly higher returns in the cross-section. We provide evidence that these funds’ managers are more skilled at exploiting the market’s ex ante rare disaster concerns (SEDs), which may not be associated with disaster risk. In particular, high-SED funds, on average, outperform low-SED funds by 0.96% per month, but have less exposure to disaster risk. They continue to deliver superior future performance when SEDs are estimated using the disaster concern index purged of disaster risk premiums and have leverage-managing and extreme market-timing abilities. Received June 30, 2014; editorial decision August 26, 2017 by Editor Laura Starks.

Agency mortgage‐backed securities (MBS) trade simultaneously in a market for specified pools (SPs) and in the to‐be‐announced (TBA) forward market. TBA trading creates liquidity by allowing thousands of different MBS to be traded in a handful of TBA contracts. SPs that are eligible to be traded as TBAs have significantly lower trading costs than other SPs. We present evidence that TBA eligibility, in addition to characteristics of TBA‐eligible SPs, lowers trading costs. We show that dealers hedge SP inventory with TBA trades, and they are more likely to prearrange trades in SPs that are difficult to hedge.