Despite powerful advances in yield curve modeling in the last twenty years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the key practical problem of forecasting the yield curve. In this paper we do so. We use neither the no-arbitrage approach, which focuses on accurately fitting the cross...

Our new model of consumption-based habit formation preferences generates loglinear, homoskedastic macroeconomic dynamics and time-varying risk premia on bonds and stocks. Consumers' first-order condition for the real risk-free interest rate takes the form of an exactly loglinear consumption...

Changes in six-month bill rates over semiannual periods in the 1960s and 1970s are successfully related to expected changes and to surprises. The latter include unanticipated changes in expected inflation, in the growth of industrial production and base money, and in inflation uncertainty....

A new model is proposed for representinq the term to maturity structure of interest rates at a point in time.The model produces humped, monotonic and S-shaped yield curves using four parameters. Conditional on a time decay parameter, estimates of the other three are obtained by least squares....

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...

We investigate whether bonds span the volatility risk in the U.S. Treasury market, as predicted by most 'affine' term structure models. To this end, we construct powerful and model-free empirical measures of the quadratic yield variation for a cross-section of fixed-maturity zero-coupon bonds...

We show that the US Debt/GDP ratio is negatively correlated with the spread between corporate bond yields and Treasury bond yields. The result holds even when controlling for the default risk on corporate bonds. We argue that the corporate bond spread reflects a convenience yield that investors...

Asset pricing relations are developed for a vector of assets with a time varying covariance structure. Assuming that the eigenvectors are constant but the eigenvalues changing, both the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Arbitrage Pricing Theory suggest the same testable implication: the time...

The constant-maturity zero-coupon Treasury yield curve is one of the most studied datasets. We reconstruct the yield curve using a non-parametric kernel-smoothing method with a novel adaptive bandwidth specifically designed to fit the Treasury yield curve. Our curve is globally smooth while...

We quantify the difference in the convenience yield of U.S. Treasuries and the bonds of near default-free sovereigns by measuring the gap between the FX swap-implied dollar yield paid by foreign governments and the U.S. Treasury dollar yield. We call this wedge the “U.S. Treasury Premium.”...