The liquidity of corporate and government bonds: drivers and sensitivity to different market conditions

In this report we investigate the liquidity of the European fixed income market using a large sample of government, corporate and covered bonds. We construct a robust liquidity index, based on PCA, to aggregate several measures and proxies for liquidity and estimate a multivariate regression models to identify the main factors driving bond liquidity in ordinary times as well as in times of market stress. We find that European bond liquidity is driven by bonds’ specific characteristics such as duration, rating, amount issued and time to maturity. The sensitivity of bond liquidity to these factors is larger when markets are under stress.