The Bank of Canada has released Discussion Paper 2009-14 by Jonathan Witmer, Market Timing of Long-Term Debt Issuance:
The literature on market timing of long-term debt issuance yields mixed evidence that managers can successfully time their debt-maturity issuance. The early results that are indicative of debt-maturity timing are not robust to accounting for structural breaks or to other measures of debt maturity from firm-level data that account for call and put provisions in debt contracts. The author applies the analysis from some recent U.S. studies to aggregate Canadian data to determine whether the market-timing results are robust. Although the relation between debt maturity and future excess returns is in the same direction as in the United States, it is not statistically significant. This mixed evidence, combined with the difficulties in interpreting predictive regressions of this nature, provides little support for the notion that firms can effectively reduce their cost of capital by varying the maturity of their debt issuance to take advantage of market conditions. Managers do, however, try to time their debt-maturity issuance, given that long-term corporate debt issuance in both Canada and the United States is negatively related to the term spread.
One possible mechanism of interest is:
An argument against [firms that are successfully timing an inefficient market as an explanation for the relation between future excess long-term bond returns and the long-term share [return]] is that, as a whole, corporate managers should not have inside information on the evolution of future market interest rates, so the evidence that their issuance decisions predict interest rates raises the question as to how firms in the aggregate have some sort of advantage over other sophisticated market participants, such as banks and institutional investors, in recognizing market mispricings. To explain this, Greenwood, Hanson, and Stein (2009) propose a “gap-filling” theory, whereby corporate issuers act as macro liquidity providers (e.g., by issuing long-term debt) in a segmented bond market where certain groups of investors have fixed maturity preferences for long-term assets.19 Consistent with this theory, they show that corporations issue more long-term debt when the government issues relatively less long-term debt.20 Moreover, they use firm-level data to show that larger firms and firms in better financial position are more likely to engage in “gap filling.” If long-term Treasuries provide a lower expected return when their supply decreases relative to short-term Treasuries,21 this provides an explanation of the apparent ability of corporations’ aggregate issuing characteristics to predict future bond returns.
This would be the flip-side of “crowding out”.
However, the author concludes:
In Canada, the relation between debt maturity and future excess returns is in the same direction as in the United States, but it is not statistically significant. This mixed evidence, combined with the difficulties in interpreting predictive regressions of this nature, provides little support for the notion that firms can effectively reduce their cost of capital by varying the maturity of their debt issuance to take advantage of market conditions. Managers do, however, try to time their debt-maturity issuance, given that longer-term corporate debt issuance in both Canada and the United States is negatively related to the term spread. In the United States, corporations also may be providing liquidity at a macro level, since corporate debt issuance is negatively related to the proportion of government long-term debt outstanding. In Canada, there is less evidence for a relation between these two variables. Hence, while managers are not successful at forecasting future returns, they at least attempt to do so, and changing their maturity structure in such a way could increase the risk of liquidation if managers issue more short-term debt in an attempt to time interest rates. But the increased liquidation risk at the end of the sample period caused by debt-maturity timing is probably minimal, given that Canadian corporations had a long-term share of corporate debt outstanding comparable to historic norms.
One possible mechanism that I was sorry to see not tested or discussed is the idea that managers out-perform the market because they have inside information about their own firms and projects. Under this hypothesis, managers would issue 30-year paper to fund a long-term project simply because the numbers work for them – e.g., future operational profits will exceed the cost of funding (hopefully substantially). Their ability to fund long term profitable projects should, in aggregate, affect macroeconomic spreads and bond returns, since project will be funded when the required yield works, and not funded when it doesn’t.