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Journal Article
Special repo rates: an introduction
Transactions involving repurchase agreements (known as repos and reverses) are important tools the Federal Reserve uses in implementing monetary policy. By undertaking such transactions with primary dealers, the Fed can temporarily increase or decrease the quantity of reserves in the banking system. The focus of this article is the repo market, especially the role the market plays in the financing and hedging activities of primary dealers. The author explains the close relation between the price premium that newly auctioned, or on-the-run, Treasury securities command and the special repo ...
Journal Article
Forces that shape the yield curve
The yield curve shows how the yield on a government bond depends on the bond's maturity. Monetary policymakers and observers pay special attention to the shape of the yield curve as an indicator of the economic impact of current and future monetary policy. Without the proper analytical tools, however, drawing inferences from the yield curve can be difficult. This article uses high-school algebra to introduce those tools in a rigorous but accessible way. ; The author develops the basic ideas about the yield curve using an analogy. Next, he discusses bond pricing in a world of perfect ...
Working Paper
Consumption and asset prices with homothetic recursive preferences
When preferences are homothetic, utility can be expressed in terms of current consumption and a variable that captures all information about future opportunities. We use this observation to express the differential equation that characterizes utility as a restriction on the information variable in terms of the dynamics of consumption. We derive the supporting price system and returns process and thereby characterize optimal consumption and portfolio decisions. We provide a fast and accurate numerical solution method and illustrate its use with a number of Markovian models. In addition, we ...
Working Paper
Consumption and asset prices with recursive preferences: Continuous-time approximations to discrete-time models
This paper presents tractable and efficient numerical solutions to general equilibrium models of asset prices and consumption where the representative agent has recursive preferences. It provides a discrete-time presentation of the approach of Fisher and Gilles (1999), treating continuous-time representations as approximations to discrete-time "truth." First, exact discrete-time solutions are derived, illustrating the following ideas: (i) The price-dividend ratio (such as the wealth-consumption ratio) is a perpetuity (the canonical infinitely lived asset), the value of which is the sum of ...
Working Paper
Bayesian Inference and Prediction of a Multiple-Change-Point Panel Model with Nonparametric Priors
Change point models using hierarchical priors share in the information of each regime when estimating the parameter values of a regime. Because of this sharing, hierarchical priors have been very successful when estimating the parameter values of short-lived regimes and predicting the out-of-sample behavior of the regime parameters. However, the hierarchical priors have been parametric. Their parametric nature leads to global shrinkage that biases the estimates of the parameter coefficient of extraordinary regimes toward the value of the average regime. To overcome this shrinkage, we model ...
Working Paper
Bayesian Nonparametric Learning of How Skill Is Distributed across the Mutual Fund Industry
In this paper, we use Bayesian nonparametric learning to estimate the skill of actively managed mutual funds and also to estimate the population distribution for this skill. A nonparametric hierarchical prior, where the hyperprior distribution is unknown and modeled with a Dirichlet process prior, is used for the skill parameter, with its posterior predictive distribution being an estimate of the population distribution. Our nonparametric approach is equivalent to an infinitely ordered mixture of normals where we resolve the uncertainty in the mixture order by partitioning the funds into ...
Working Paper
Forces that shape the yield curve: Parts 1 and 2
The yield curve is shaped by (1) expectations of the future path of short-term interest rates and (2) uncertainty about the path. Uncertainty affects the yield curve through two channels: (1) investors' attitudes toward risk as reflected in risk premia, and (2) the nonlinear relation between yields and bond prices (known as convexity). The way in which these forces simultaneously work to shape the yield curve can be understood in terms of the conditions that guarantee the absence of arbitrage opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the modern theory of the ...
Working Paper
Fitting a distribution to survey data for the half-life of deviations from PPP
This note presents a nonparametric Bayesian approach to fitting a distribution to the survey data provided in Kilian and Zha (2002) regarding the prior for the half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP). A point mass at infinity is included. The unknown density is represented as an average of shape-restricted Bernstein polynomials, each of which has been skewed according to a preliminary parametric fit. A sparsity prior is adopted for regularization.
Working Paper
Inflation and monetary regimes
Correlations of inflation with the growth rate of money increase when data are averaged over longer time periods. Correlations of inflation with the growth of money also are higher when high-inflation as well as low-inflation countries are included in the analysis. We show that serial correlation in the underlying inflation rate ties these two observations together and explains them. We present evidence that averaging increases the correlation of inflation and money growth more when the underlying inflation rate has higher serial correlation.
Working Paper
Around and around: the expectations hypothesis
We show how to construct arbitrage-free models of the term structure of interest rates in which various expectations hypotheses can hold. McCulloch (1993) provided a Gaussian non-Markovian example of the unbiased expectations hypothesis (U--EH), thereby contradicting the assertion by Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (CIR, 1981) that only the so-called local expectations hypothesis could hold. We generalize that example in three ways: (i) We characterize the U--EH in terms of forward rates; (ii) we extend this characterization to a class of expectations hypotheses that includes all of those considered ...