Most central banks effect changes to their target or policy rate in discrete increments (e.g., multiples of 0.25%) following public announcements on scheduled dates. Still, for most applications, researchers rely on the assumption that the policy rate changes linearly with economic conditions...

The uncertainty around future changes to the Federal Reserve target rate varies over time. In our results, the main driver of uncertainty is a "path" factor signaling information about future policy actions, which is filtered from federal funds futures data. The uncertainty is highest when it...

We build a model for bond yields based on a small-scale representation of an economy with secular declines in inflation, the real rate and output growth. Long-run restrictions identify nominal shocks that influence long-run inflation but do not influence the long-run real rate or output growth....

We provide a decomposition of nominal yields into real yields, expectations of future inflation and inflation risk premiums when real bonds or inflation swaps are unavailable or unreliable due to their relative illiquidity. We combine nominal yields with surveys of inflation forecasts within a...

Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) show that (i) lagged forward rates improve the predictability of annual bond returns, adding to current forward rates, and that (ii) a Markovian model for monthly forward rates cannot generate the pattern of predictability in annual returns. These results stand as a...

Specifications of the Federal Reserve target rate that have more realistic features mitigate in-sample over-fitting and are favored in the data. Imposing a positivity constraint and discrete increments significantly increases the accuracy of model out-of-sample forecasts for the level and...

We greatly expand the space of tractable term-structure models. We consider one example that combines positive yields with rich volatility and correlation dynamics. Bond prices are expressed in closed form and estimation is straightforward. We find that the early stages of a recession have...

Recent asset pricing models of limits to arbitrage emphasize the role of funding conditions faced by financial intermediaries. In the US, the repo market is the key funding market. Then, the premium of on-the-run U.S. Treasury bonds should share a common component with risk premia in other...

Following theory, we check that funding risk connects illiquidity, volatility and returns in the cross-section of stocks. We show that the illiquidity and volatility of stocks increase with funding shocks, while contemporaneous returns decrease with funding shocks. The dispersions of...