Mandated post-trade transparency in secondary markets lowers the cost of issuing corporate bonds. We show that costs are lower due to the mitigation of information asymmetry in the issuing process. Three pieces of evidence support this finding. First, new issues with higher information asymmetry experience relatively larger reductions in issuing costs. These bonds also experience lower reductions in trading activity than lower information asymmetry bonds, so liquidity cannot explain these results. Second, when a larger fraction of trades in comparable bonds are made post-trade transparent, new issue pricing improves. This holds when conditioning on expected bond liquidity. Third, transparency raises prices in the secondary market, but not by as much as it does for newly issued bonds.

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二级市场透明度和公司债券发行成本

二级市场的强制性交易后透明度降低了发行公司债券的成本。我们表明，由于发行过程中信息不对称的缓解，成本较低。三个证据支持这一发现。首先，信息不对称程度较高的新发行发行成本降低幅度较大。这些债券的交易活动减少也低于信息不对称债券，因此流动性无法解释这些结果。其次，当可比债券的大部分交易在交易后变得透明时，新发行的定价就会提高。这在以预期债券流动性为条件时成立。第三，透明度提高了二级市场的价格，但幅度不及新发行的债券。