The Microstructure of China's Government Bond Market

Price Pressure in the Government Bond Market

What determines the term structure of interest rates? Standard economic theory links the interest rate for maturity T to the willingness of a representative agent to substitute consumption between times 0 and T. The standard model contrasts sharply with a more informal view based on investors’ preferred habitat, proposed by John Culbertson (1957) and Franco Modigliani and Richard Sutch (1966). ...

The Microstructure of the Bond Market in the 20th Century

Bonds are traded in over-the-counter markets, where opacity and fragmentation imply large transaction costs for retail investors. Is there something special about bonds, in contrast to stocks, precluding transparent limit-order markets? Historical experience suggests this is not the case. Before WWII, there was an active market in corporate and municipal bonds on the NYSE. Activity dropped dram...

Sovereign Risk Premiums in the European Government Bond Market

This paper provides a study of bond yield differentials among EU government bonds issued between 1993 and 2005 on the basis of a unique dataset of issue spreads in the US and DM (Euro) bond market. Interest differentials between bonds issued by EU countries and Germany or the USA contain risk premiums which increase with fiscal imbalances and depend negatively on the issuer's relative bond mark...

Market Microstructure Effects of Government Intervention in the Foreign Exchange Market

An asymmetric information model of the bid-ask spread is developed for foreign exchange market subject to occasional government interventions. Traditional tests of the unbiasedness of the forward rate as a predictor of the future spot rate are shown to be inconsistent when the rates are measured as the average of their respective bid and ask quotes. Larger bid-ask spreads on Fridays are documen...

Pricing and Risks of China’s Local Government Bond Market by