Research On The Influence Of Customer Stability On Corporate Bond Credit Spread

In the context of the normalization of defaults in the bond market,corporate financing constraints and operational safety problems have become increasingly serious,and many enterprises have fallen into a vicious circle of rising default risks and capital shortages,which has been exacerbated by the outbreak of the new crown epidemic,which has made the debt risks of some enterprises more obvious.As an important channel for external financing of enterprises,the bond market has experienced a large number of defaults in recent years,which has triggered the capital market to attach great importance to bond risks and continue to pay attention.Risk return is an important indicator to measure the risk of corporate bonds,which reflects the return that enterprises can get from taking risks,this indicator is often called bond credit spread,representing the default risk and liquidity risk of corporate bonds,and its influencing factors have always been the focus of concern in theoretical and practical circles.Customers are an integral part of the supply chain,and strong customer relationships help maintain the security of the supply chain,thereby keeping the company’s earnings stable.Studies have shown that stable customers can convey a message of a company’s stable operations and profits to the outside world,while drastic changes in customers carry greater risks.Therefore,establishing stable customer relationships can be one of the key factors affecting corporate bond credit spreads.This paper aims to explore the impact of customer stability on corporate bond credit spread,and to study it based on the theoretical background of supply chain literature and risk management.To this end,this paper takes the data of corporate bonds issued by A-share listed companies in China from 2010 to 2020 as a research sample,and the original data are derived from the data of Wind,CSMAR and China Research Data Service Platform(CNRDS),and carefully supplemented and cross-verified in order to achieve more accurate empirical results.In this paper,a panel fixed-effect model is used to explore the impact of the change of the total sales proportion of the top five customers on the credit spread of corporate bonds,and the sample is regressed by grouping to prove the reliability of the main hypothesis.The results show that:(1)the higher the instability of customers,the corresponding increase in the credit spread of corporate bonds.Larger customer movements will make investors demand greater credit risk returns,causing corporate bond credit spreads to climb further.(2)The impact of customer stability on corporate bond credit spreads is heterogeneous at the customer,bond,company,macro and industry levels.When there are large customers and the customers are private enterprises,it will enhance the risk of corporate bond credit spreads when the stability of customers is weak.Secured bonds,low credit ratings,financing for liquidity relief,higher selling expense ratios,lower profitability and smaller company size enhance the impact of customer stability on credit spreads,while state-owned backgrounds weaken the credit risk premium increased by customer instability.At the same time,in highly competitive industries,during periods of tight monetary policy and periods of low economic growth,the negative effect of unstable customers on corporate bond credit spreads will be more pronounced.(3)In-depth analysis of the transmission mechanism of customer stability,we find that the increasing effect of unstable customers on corporate bond credit spreads will be partially intermediated by factors such as audit quality,enterprise risk taking and information asymmetry.In terms of robustness test,the changes in the sum of squares of the sales ratio of the top five major customers and the changes in the sales ratio of the first largest customer were replaced by the stability of customers,and the explanatory variables were replaced by the credit spread of the bonds calculated by using CDB bonds as the risk-free interest rate.In addition,Heckman two-stage processing sample self-selection problem is also used in this paper,and combined with PSM procanciousness score matching method,endogenous tests are performed on the samples to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the results.Our findings remain significant in different contexts.The innovation of this paper mainly has four aspects:(1)measuring customer stability by the change of customer concentration,and constructing multiple different customer stability indicators to test the robustness of the results;(2)shift the focus of research from issuance pricing to secondary market corporate bond credit spreads,and deeply explore the relationship between customer stability and trading market bond credit spreads;(3)From four aspects and multiple sub-perspectives,the changes of customer stability on the return effect of bond credit spread were comprehensively analyzed,and the influence mechanism was deeply discussed from three levels.(4)It puts forward a unique insight into the practice of key customer certification supervision theory in foreign literature in the Chinese market.This study aims to deeply explore how customer stability affects the credit spread of corporate bonds in the secondary market,clarify how customer relationships affect the risk premium demand of bond investors,and provide a new perspective for the study of factors that directly affect the credit spread of corporate bonds.In addition,this paper will also explore the influence of different customer characteristics,bond characteristics,bond issuer characteristics,and customer stability on corporate bond credit spreads under macro and industry competitive environments,and examine the transmission mechanisms of accounting information quality,enterprise risk taking and information asymmetry through empirical analysis,in order to better understand the negative impact of customer stability on corporate bond credit spreads.By closely combining customer stability with the bond market,the role of large clients in the bond market and its influence mechanism are systematically discussed,which provides a new perspective for in-depth study of customer stability and its far-reaching impact on bond risk management.