US leveraged loan and debt markets: Implications for optimal portfolio and hedging

This paper offers fresh empirical evidence on the relationship between leverage loans and US debt markets by investigating the distributional predictability and directional predictability between leveraged loans and treasury bonds, fixed income securities and corporate bonds in the U.S economy. We use daily price data from January 2013 to April 2021. First, we analyze the causal relationship between variables by applying non-parametric causality-in-quantiles test and find that quantile causality in variance shows the stronger impact of leverage loan market returns on US debt market returns over the entire quantile range. Second, quantile dependence and directional predictability between leverage loan market and US debt markets are analyzed by applying cross-quantilogram approach and estimated results show the heterogeneous quantile relations from leverage loan market to US debt market. Moreover, the cross-quantile correlation results demonstrate the evidence of negative predictability from leverage loan market to US debt market in low, medium and high quantile range. These evidences are important for US investors and portfolio managers.