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Working Paper
Economic determinants of the nominal treasury yield curve
We study the effect of different types of macroeconomic impulses on the nominal yield curve. We employ two distinct approaches to identifying economic shocks in VARs. Our first approach uses a structural VAR due to Gal (1992). Our second strategy identifies fundamental impulses from alternative empirical measures of economic shocks proposed in the literature. We find that most of the long-run variability of interest rates of all maturities is driven by macroeconomic impulses. Shocks to preferences for current consumption consistently induce large, persistent, and statistically significant ...
Working Paper
Consumption-based modeling of long-horizon returns
Numerous studies have documented the failure of consumption-based pricing models to explain observed patterns in stock and bond returns. This failure has sometimes been attributed to frictions, transaction costs or durability. If such frictions are important, they should primarily affect the higher frequency components of asset returns. The long-swings, or lower-frequency comovements should be less affected. Consequently if transaction costs are important, tests of the consumption based asset pricing model which concentrate on lower-frequency components may be more successful.
Working Paper
Monetary policy and the term structure of nominal interest rates: evidence and theory
This paper explores how exogenous impulses to monetary policy affect the yield curve for nominally risk-free bonds. We identify monetary policy shocks using three distinct variants of the identified VAR methodology. All three approaches imply similar patterns for the effect of monetary policy shocks on the term structure: A contractionary policy shock induces a pronounced positive but short-lived response in short term interest rates, with a smaller effect on medium-term rates and almost no effect on long term rates. Because of their transitory impact, monetary policy shocks account for a ...
Working Paper
Thoughts on financial derivatives, systematic risk, and central banking: a review of some recent developments
This paper critically reviews the literature examining the role of central banks in addressing systemic risk. We focus on how the growth in derivatives markets might affect that role. Analysis of systemic risk policy is hampered by the lack of a consensus theory of systemic risk. We propose a set of criteria that theories of systemic risk should satisfy, and we critically discuss a number of theories proposed in the literature. We argue that concerns about systemic effects of derivatives appear somewhat overstated. In particular, derivative markets do not appear unduly prone to systemic ...
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Conference Paper
Bank capital standards for market risk: a welfare analysis
Working Paper
On biases in tests of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates
We document extreme bias and dispersion in the small sample distributions of five standard regression tests of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates. These biases derive from the extreme persistence in short interest rates. We derive approximate analytic expressions for these biases, and we characterize the small-sample distributions of these test statistics under a simple first-order autoregressive data generating process for the short rate. The biases are also present when the short rate is modeled with a more realistic regime-switching process. The differences ...