Search Results
Journal Article
Lifecycle investment decisions and labor income risk
The optimal proportion of financial wealth placed in stocks versus risk-free bonds changes over an investor's life and is very sensitive to the long-run correlation between stock returns and labor income. If this correlation is assumed to be high, then the optimal proportion of stock is hump-shaped and approximately zero for young agents, in contrast to the claims of financial advisers and most academic models.
Discussion Paper
Monetary Policy, Inflation Outlook, and Recession Probabilities
An inverted yield curve—defined as an episode in which long-maturity Treasury yields fall below their short-maturity counterparts—is a powerful near-term predictor of recessions. While most previous studies focus on the predictive power of the spread between long- and short-maturity Treasury yields, Engstrom and Sharpe (2019) have recently shown that a measure of the nominal near-term forward spread (NTFS), given by the difference between the six-quarter-ahead forward Treasury yield and the current three-month Treasury bill rate, dominates long-term spreads as a leading indicator of ...
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, ...
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 ...
Newsletter
Sources of Fluctuation in Short-Term Yields and Recession Probabilities
An inverted yield curve—defined as an episode in which long-maturity Treasury yields fall below their short-maturity counterparts—is a powerful near-term predictor of recessions. While most previous studies focus on the predictive power of the spread between the long- and short-term Treasury yields, Engstrom and Sharpe (2019) have recently shown that a measure of the nominal near-term forward spread (NTFS), given by the difference between the six-quarter-ahead forward Treasury yield and the current three-month Treasury bill rate, dominates long-term spreads as a leading indicator of ...
Working Paper
The 2025 U.S. Debt Limit Through the Lens of Financial Markets
We examine the 2025 U.S. debt limit episode through the lens of financial markets. First, we document an increase in trading activity in the U.S. sovereign CDS market, and we infer a probability of default from CDS premiums. We find that default risk reached 1% by the November 6 Presidential election, fell quickly after that, and progressively climbed back up in subsequent months to the current 1.1% level. Overall, these estimates are well below the default risk estimates for the debt-limit episodes of 2011, 2013, and 2023, which range from 4% to 6%. Second, so far we only find small ...
Working Paper
Modeling credit contagion via the updating of fragile beliefs
We propose a tractable equilibrium model for pricing defaultable bonds that are subject to contagion risk. Contagion arises because agents with ?fragile beliefs? are uncertain about both the underlying state of the economy and the posterior probabilities associated with these states. As such, agents adopt a robust decision rule for updating that leads them to over-weight the posterior probabilities of ?bad? states. We estimate the model using panel data on sovereign Euro-zone CDS spreads during the recent crisis, and find that it captures levels and dynamics of spreads better than traditional ...
Working Paper
Stochastic volatility
Given the importance of return volatility on a number of practical financial management decisions, the efforts to provide good real- time estimates and forecasts of current and future volatility have been extensive. The main framework used in this context involves stochastic volatility models. In a broad sense, this model class includes GARCH, but we focus on a narrower set of specifications in which volatility follows its own random process, as is common in models originating within financial economics. The distinguishing feature of these specifications is that volatility, being inherently ...
Working Paper
Asymmetric Information, Dynamic Debt Issuance, and the Term Structure of Credit Spreads
We propose a tractable model of a firm?s dynamic debt and equity issuance policies in the presence of asymmetric information. Because ?investment-grade? firms can access debt markets, managers who observe a bad private signal can both conceal this information and shield shareholders from infusing capital into the firm by issuing new debt to service existing debt, thus avoiding default. The implication is that the ?asymmetric information channel? can generate jumps to default (from the creditors? perspective) only for those "high-yield" firms that have exhausted their ability to borrow. ...