Is The Rush To Safety Making Corporate Bonds Unsafe?

Is The Rush To Safety Making Corporate Bonds Unsafe? by Knowledge@Wharton

Skittish investors seeking safety have poured a lot of money into corporate bond mutual funds in recent years. Which raises the question: What happens when that flow reverses?  

In their paper, “Investor Flows and Fragility in Corporate Bond Funds,” Wharton finance professor Itay Goldstein, and co-authors Hao Jiang of Michigan State and David Ng of Cornell, studied the flows in performance of those mutual funds to determine what impact heavy withdrawals can have on individual funds, the bond market, and the broader economy. In this interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Goldstein explains what they learned.

An edited transcript of the interview appears below.

A Question...