Forward foreign exchange contracts embed not only expected depreciation but also a sizable premium, which complicates inferences about anticipated returns. This study derives arbitrage-free affine forward currency models (AFCMs) with closed-form expressions for both unobservable variables. Model...

Purportedly consistent with "risk parity" (RP) asset allocation, recent studies document compelling "low risk" trading strategies that exploit a persistently negative relation between Sharpe ratios (SRs) and maturity along the U.S. Treasury (UST) term structure. This paper extends this evidence...

A vast literature reports excess returns to momentum strategies across many financial asset classes. However, no study examines trading rules based on price history along individual government-bond term structures - that is, with respect to duration buckets across the curve - as opposed to...

A small but ambitious literature uses affine arbitrage-free models to estimate jointly U.S. Treasury term premiums and the term structure of equity risk premiums. Within this approach, this paper identifies the parameter restrictions that are consistent with a simple dividend discount model,...

Since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began announcing its policy decisions in 1994, U.S. stock returns have on average been more than thirty times larger on announcement days than on other days. Surprisingly, these abnormal returns are accrued before the policy announcement. The excess...

We provide robust evidence of deviations from the covered interest rate parity (CIP) relation since the onset of the financial crisis in August 2007. The CIP deviations exist with respect to several different dollar-denominated interest rates and exchange rate pairings of the dollar vis-à-vis...

Spreads of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) vary significantly in the cross section and over time, but the sources of this variation are not well understood. We document that, in the cross section, MBS spreads adjusted for the prepayment option show a pronounced smile with respect to the...

Reduced-form models of default that attribute a large fraction of credit spreads to compensation for credit event risk typically preclude the most plausible economic justification for such risk to be priced - namely, a contagious response of the market portfolio during the credit event. When...

We investigate intermediary asset pricing theories empirically and find strong support for models that have intermediary leverage as the relevant state variable. A parsimonious model that uses detrended dealer leverage as a price-of-risk variable, and innovations to dealer leverage as a pricing...

Real-time macroeconomic data refl ect the information available to market participants, whereas fi nal data-containing revisions and released with a delay-overstate the information set available to them. We document that the in-sample and out-of-sample Treasury return predictability is signifi...