No-Arbitrage Restrictions and the U.S. Treasury Market

What is the role of arbitrage trading in the U.S. Treasury market? We discuss the pricing of risk-free Treasury securities via no-arbitrage arguments and illustrate how this approach works in models of the term structure of interest rates. The article continues with an evaluation of market frictions (for example, transaction costs, leverage constraints, and the limited availability of arbitrage capital) in the government debt market. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of such frictions for monetary policy and the pricing of bonds using no-arbitrage term structure models