Over the last two decades, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the rate-setting body of the United States Federal Reserve System, has become increasingly communicative and transparent. According to policymakers, one of the goals of this shift has been to improve monetary policy...

Most mortgages in the U.S. are securitized in agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Yield spreads on these securities are thus a key determinant of homeowners' funding costs. We study variation in MBS spreads over time and across securities, and document a cross-sectional smile pattern in MBS...

This paper estimates the term-structure of volatility risk premia for the stock market. Realized variance term premia are increasing in systematic risk and predict variance swap returns. Implied volatility term premia are decreasing in risk initially, but then increase at a lag, predicting VIX...

We estimate the term structure of the price of variance risk (PVR), which helps distinguish between competing asset-pricing theories. First, we measure the PVR as proportional to the Sharpe ratio of short-term holding returns of delta-neutral index straddles; second, we estimate the PVR in a...

The illiquidity of long-maturity options has made it difficult to study the term structures of option spanning portfolios. This paper proposes a new estimation and inference framework for these option-implied term structures that addresses long-maturity illiquidity. By building a sieve estimator...

Background: We investigated the determination of the pledged loan-to-value ratio in an optionpricing environment and mainly articulated the theoretical framework and analytical method. Methods: The basic idea is that the present value of the pledged loan payoff is equal to a put option’s...

The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury Note is among the most cited interest rates by investors, policymakers, and fnancial institutions. We show that the 10-year Treasury yield's forward-looking volatility, a VIX-style measure that is a proxy for uncertainty about future interest rates, is a...