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Working Paper
Inflation expectations, real rates, and risk premia: evidence from inflation swaps
This paper develops a model of the term structures of nominal and real interest rates driven by state variables representing the short-term real interest rate, expected inflation, inflation?s central tendency, and four volatility factors that follow GARCH processes. We derive analytical solutions for nominal bond yields, yields on inflation-indexed bonds that have an indexation lag, and the term structure of expected inflation. Unlike prior studies, the model?s parameters are estimated using data on inflation swap rates, as well as nominal yields and survey forecasts of inflation. The ...
Working Paper
Getting the most out of a mandatory subordinated debt requirement
Recent advances in asset pricing-the reduced-form approach to pricing risky debt and derivatives-are used to quantitatively evaluate several proposals for mandatory bank issue of subordinated debt. The authors find that credit spreads on both fixed- and floating-rate subordinated debt provide relatively clean signals of bank risk and are not unduly influenced by non-risk factors. Fixed-rate debt with a put is unacceptable, but making the putable debt floating resolves most problems. The authors' approach also helps to clarify several different notions of "bank risk."
Working Paper
Jump starting GARCH: pricing and hedging options with jumps in returns and volatilities
This paper considers the pricing of options when there are jumps in the pricing kernel and correlated jumps in asset returns and volatilities. Our model nests Duan?s GARCH option models, where conditional returns are constrained to being normal, as well as mixed jump processes as used in Merton. The diffusion limits of our model have been shown to include jump diffusion models, stochastic volatility models and models with both jumps and diffusive elements in both returns and volatilities. Empirical analysis on the S&P 500 index reveals that the incorporation of jumps in returns and ...
Working Paper
On flexibility, capital structure, and investment decisions for the insured bank
Most models of deposit insurance assume that the volatility of a bank's assets is exogenously provided. Although this framework allows the impact of volatility on bankruptcy costs and deposit insurance subsidies to be explored, it is static and does not incorporate the fact that equityholders can respond to market events by adjusting previous investment and leverage decisions. This paper presents a dynamic model of a bank that allows for such behavior. The flexibility of being able to respond dynamically to market information has value to equityholders. The impact and value of this ...
Working Paper
Monitoring and controlling bank risk: does risky debt serve any purpose?
To examine whether mandating banks to issue subordinated debt would enhance market monitoring and control risk-taking, the authors extract the credit-spread curve for each banking firm in their sample. After controlling for changes in market and liquidity variables, they find that changes in credit spreads do not reflect changes in bank risk variables. The result is robust to firm type, examination rating, size, leverage, and profitability, as well as to different model specifications. They also find that issuing subordinated debt does not alter banks' risk-taking behavior. They conclude that ...
Conference Paper
On credit spread slopes and predicting bank risk
Working Paper
The changing role of banks and the changing value of deposit guarantees
Using a model for pricing deposit guarantees that treats the bank's investments as a portfolio of default-free bonds and risky loans, the authors push back uncertainty to the level of the borrowing firm and thus are able to explore how factors like firm leverage, loan maturity, and correlation effects between the firm's assets and interest rates affect the value of deposit guarantees.
Working Paper
On forecasting the term structure of credit spreads
Predictions of firm-by-firm term structures of credit spreads based on current spot and forward values can be improved upon by exploiting information contained in the shape of the credit-spread curve. However, the current credit-spread curve is not a sufficient statistic for predicting future credit spreads; the explanatory power can be increased further by exploiting information contained in the shape of the riskless-yield curve. In the presence of credit-spread and riskless factors, other macroeconomic, marketwide, and firm-specific risk variables do not significantly improve predictions of ...
Working Paper
Regulatory taxes, investment, and financing decision for insured banks
An investigation of the effects of interest rate and credit risk on optimal capital structure and investment decisions. The authors show that with no uncertainty in interest rates, capital regulation will reduce the risk of the bank's assets, but that under interest rate uncertainty, the impact of regulation may be detrimental and raise the risk of the deposits as well as government subsidies to the bank's shareholders.
Working Paper
On Markovian representations of the term structure
The linkages between term structures separated by finite time periods can be complex. Indeed, in general, the dynamics of the term structure could depend on the entire set of information revealed since the earlier date. This path dependence, which causes difficulties in pricing interest rate claims, is usually eliminated by making specific assumptions on investment behavior or on the evolution of interest rates. In contrast, this article identifies the class of volatility structures that permits the path dependence to be captured by a single sufficient statistic. An equilibrium framework is ...