This paper evaluates the performance of a kind of interest rate model that has increasingly been attracting the attention of the financial industry in recent years and which relies on principal component analysis to extract risk factors. Focusing on the Spanish bond market, our empirical analysis reveals that interest rate movements can be summarized by three principal components, related to th...

We study the properties of foreign exchange risk premia that can explain the forward bias puzzle – the tendency of high-interest rate currencies to appreciate rather than depreciate. These risk premia arise endogenously from the no-arbitrage condition we impose on the relation between the term structure of interest rates and exchange rates, and they compensate for both currency risk and interes...

We ®nd empirical evidence that in ̄ation, nominal, and real interest rates in the US are trend-stationary with a structural break in both the unconditional mean and the drift rate of a deterministic trend, which occurs shortly after the change in operating procedures of the Fed in September 1979. This ®nding casts some doubts on cointegration tests of the long-run Fisher e€ect conducted in recen...

This article discusses the microstructure of the U.S. Treasury securities market. Treasury securities are nominally riskless debt instruments issued by the U.S. government. Microstructural analysis is a field of economics/finance that examines the roles played by heterogenous agents, institutional detail, and asymmetric information in the trading process. The article describes types of Treasury...

It is commonly believed that the Fed’s ability to control the federal funds rate stems from its ability to alter the supply of liquidity in the overnight market through open market operations. This paper uses daily data compiled by the author from the records of the Trading Desk of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York over the period March 1, 1984, through December 31, 1996: He analyzes the Des...

For evaluating a hedging strategy we have to know at every instant the solution of the Cauchy problem for a parabolic equation (the value of the hedging portfolio) and its derivatives (the deltas). We suggest to nd these magnitudes by Monte Carlo simulation of the corresponding system of stochastic di erential equations using weak solution schemes. It turns out that with one and the same contro...

The slope of the Treasury yield curve has often been cited as a leading economic indicator, with inversion of the curve being thought of as a harbinger of a recession. In this paper, I consider a number of probit models using the yield curve to forecast recessions. Models that use both the level of the federal funds rate and the term spread give better insample fit, and better out-of-sample pre...

This paper examines the predictive content of several macroeconomic variables for the decisions of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to change its target for the Federal funds rate. To take the discrete nature of the target changes and their serial dependence into account we develop forecasting procedures that are based on dynamic extensions of a multinomial logit model. We …nd that the ...

Cap and swaption prices contain information on interest rate volatilities and correlations. In this paper, we examine whether this information in cap and swaption prices is consistent with realized movements of the interest rate term structure. To extract an option-implied interest rate covariance matrix from cap and swaption prices, we use Libor market models or discrete-tenor string models as...

The interaction of liqu id ity constraints and a precautionary savings motive in an economy with consumer heterogeneity in the form of non-stationary, un insurab le , idiosyncratic earnings pro cesses re solves the risk free rate puzzle. The general equ ilibrium bu er stock saving model generates interest rates that match empirical regularities when idiosyncratic sho cks contain both persistent...