Search Results
Working Paper
Portfolio choice over the life-cycle when the stock and labor markets are cointegrated
We study portfolio choice when labor income and dividends are cointegrated. Economically plausible calibrations suggest young investors should take substantial short positions in the stock market. Because of cointegration the young agent's human capital effectively becomes.
Working Paper
Estimating the Tax and Credit-Event Risk Components of Credit Spreads
This paper argues that tax liabilities explain a large fraction of observed short-maturity investment-grade (IG) spreads, but credit-event premia do not. First, we extend Duffie and Lando (2001) by permitting management to issue both debt and equity. Rather than defaulting, managers of IG firms who receive bad private signals conceal this information and service existing debt via new debt issuance. Consistent with empirical observation, this strategy implies that IG firms have virtually zero credit-event risk (at least until they become ?fallen angels"). Second, we provide empirical evidence ...
Journal Article
On the Mechanics of Fiscal Inflations
The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we wish to better explain the relationship between Sargent and Wallace’s (1981) unpleasant monetarist arithmetic, the closely connected fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL), and the monetarist view of inflation. Second, we discuss how the recent inflationary episode has contributed to redistributing real resources from holders of government debt to the public purse. In particular, financial prices before the onset of the COVID pandemic suggest that investors viewed an inflationary shock such as the one we experienced as extremely unlikely, so the ...
Journal Article
Investing over the life cycle with long-run labor income risk
Many financial advisors and much of the academic literature often argue that young people should place most of their savings in stocks. In contrast, a significant fraction of U.S. households do not hold stocks. Investors typically hold very little in stocks when they are young, progressively increase their holdings as they age, and decrease their exposure to stock market risk when they approach retirement. The authors show how long-run labor income risk helps explain this evidence. Moreover, they discuss the effect of long-run labor income risk on the valuation of pension plan obligations, ...
Working Paper
What does the CDS market imply for a U.S. default?
As the debt ceiling episode unfolds, we highlight a sharp increase in trading activity and liquidity in the U.S. credit default swaps (CDS) market, as well as a spike in U.S. CDS premiums. Compared with the periods leading up to the 2011 and 2013 debt ceiling episodes, we show that elevated CDS spreads in the current environment are partially explained by the cheapening of deliverable Treasury collateral to CDS contracts. We infer the likelihood of a U.S. default from these CDS premiums, and estimate an increase in the market-implied default probability from about 0.3–0.4% in 2022, to ...
Working Paper
Why Does the Yield-Curve Slope Predict Recessions?
Why is an inverted yield-curve slope such a powerful predictor of future recessions? We show that a decomposition of the yield curve slope into its expectations and risk premia components helps disentangle the channels that connect fluctuations in Treasury rates and the future state of the economy. In particular, a change in the yield curve slope due to a monetary policy easing, measured by the current real-interest rate level and its expected path, is associated with an increase in the probability of a future recession within the next year. In contrast, a decrease in risk premia is ...
Working Paper
Explaining asset pricing puzzles associated with the 1987 market crash
The 1987 market crash was associated with a dramatic and permanent steepening of the implied volatility curve for equity index options, despite minimal changes in aggregate consumption. We explain these events within a general equilibrium framework in which expected endowment growth and economic uncertainty are subject to rare jumps. The arrival of a jump triggers the updating of agents' beliefs about the likelihood of future jumps, which produces a market crash and a permanent shift in option prices. Consumption and dividends remain smooth, and the model is consistent with salient features ...
Journal Article
No-arbitrage restrictions and the U.S. Treasury market
What is the role of arbitrage trading in the U.S. Treasury market? In this article, the authors discuss the pricing of risk-free Treasury securities via no-arbitrage arguments and illustrate how this approach works in models of the term structure of interest rates. The article ends with an evaluation of market frictions (for example, transaction costs, leverage constraints, and the limited availability of arbitrage capital) in the government debt market and their implications for bond pricing using no-arbitrage term structure models.
Newsletter
Why Does the Yield-Curve Slope Predict Recessions?
Many studies document the predictive power of the slope of the Treasury yield curve for forecasting recessions.2 This work is motivated, for example, by the empirical evidence in figure 1, which shows the term-structure slope, measured by the spread between the yields on ten-year and two-year U.S. Treasury securities, and shading that denotes U.S. recessions (dated by the National Bureau of Economic Research). Note that the yield-curve slope becomes negative before each economic recession since the 1970s.3 That is, an ?inversion? of the yield curve, in which short-maturity interest rates ...
Working Paper
Realized volatility
Realized volatility is a nonparametric ex-post estimate of the return variation. The most obvious realized volatility measure is the sum of finely-sampled squared return realizations over a fixed time interval. In a frictionless market the estimate achieves consistency for the underlying quadratic return variation when returns are sampled at increasingly higher frequency. We begin with an account of how and why the procedure works in a simplified setting and then extend the discussion to a more general framework. Along the way we clarify how the realized volatility and quadratic return ...