Investors rebalance their portfolios as their views about expected returns and risk change. We use empirical measures of portfolio rebalancing to back out investors' views, specifically their views about the state of the economy. We show that aggregate portfolio rebalancing across equity sectors...

This paper presents a model of international portfolios with real exchange rate and non financial risks that accounts for observed levels of equity home bias. A key feature is that investors can trade equities as well as domestic and foreign real bonds. Bonds matter: in equilibrium, investors...

This paper develops an affine model of the term structure of interest rates in which bond yields are driven by observable and unobservable macroeconomic factors. It imposes restrictions to identify the effects of monetary policy and other structural disturbances on output, inflation, and...

We study the economic sources of stock-bond return comovements and its time variation using a dynamic factor model. We identify the economic factors employing a semi-structural regime-switching model for state variables such as interest rates, inflation, the output gap, and cash flow growth. We...

Most affine models of the term structure with stochastic volatility (SV) predict that the variance of the short rate is simultaneously a linear combination of yields and the quadratic variation of the spot rate. However, we find empirically that the A1(3) SV model generates a time series for the...

I believe that every tax-paying firm's defined benefit pension fund portfolio should be invested entirely in bonds (or insurance contracts). Although the firm's pension funds are legally distinct from the firm, there is a close tie between the performance of the pension fund investments and the...

We examine whether there is a flight-to-liquidity premium in Treasury bond prices by comparing them with prices of bonds issued by Refcorp, a U.S. Government agency, which are guaranteed by the Treasury. We find a large liquidity premium in Treasury bonds, which can be more than fifteen percent...

This paper provides clear evidence that the yield spread between long-term taxable and tax-exempt bonds responds to changes in expected individual tax rates, a finding that refutes theories of municipal bond pricing that focus exclusively on commercial banks or other financial intermediaries....

A consensus has recently emerged that variables beyond the level, slope, and curvature of the yield curve can help predict bond returns. This paper shows that the statistical tests underlying this evidence are subject to serious small-sample distortions. We propose more robust tests, including a...

Currency denomination is a prominent feature in the analysis of the structure of international bond markets, but is largely absent from analyses of cross-border investment in debt securities. This omission owes in part to the limitations of widely used datasets such as the IMF's CPIS data (on...