Investor Diversity and Liquidity in The Secondary Loan Market

We find strong evidence that investor diversity is beneficial to loan liquidity: More diverse syndicates, as measured by the number of investor-types or the concentration of loan shares by investor-type, hold loans that have lower quoted bid-ask spreads in the secondary market. These results are robust, and do not appear to be driven by investors’ borrower/loan selection. Further, they are not driven by the presence of any particular type of investors. Our findings are consistent with Goldstein and Yang (J Financ 70:1723–1765 2015) insight that there is a strategic complementarity between different groups in trading on their information and producing information.