The Yen Risk Premium : A Story of Regime Shifts in Bond Markets

We document a new risk premium in the Japanese yen that compensates for the policy uncertainty in Japan. The yen risk premium is implied from bond markets under the assumption of no-arbitrage. We estimate a regime switching term structure model and find that in Japan, the conventional monetary policy and the zero interest rate policy are characterized by a high volatility and a low volatility regime, respectively. Uncertainty arises during the transition between regimes in the late 1990s. The associated risk premium explains the yen excess return in this period, which is not captured by affine term structure models