The London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is a widely used indicator of funding conditions in the interbank market. As of 2013, LIBOR underpins more than $300 trillion of financial contracts, including swaps and futures, in addition to trillions more in variable-rate mortgage and student loans....

We document a highly significant, strongly nonlinear dependence of stock and bond returns on past equity-market volatility as measured by the VIX. We propose a new estimator for the shape of the nonlinear forecasting relationship that exploits additional variation in the cross section of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We study general equilibrium asset prices in a multi-period endowment economy when agents' risk aversion is allowed to depend on the maturity of the risk. We find horizon-dependent riskaversion preferences generate a decreasing term structure of risk premia if and only if volatility is...

We estimate the equity risk premium (ERP) by combining information from twenty models. The ERP in 2012 and 2013 reached heightened levels - of around 12 percent - not seen since the 1970s. We conclude that the high ERP was caused by unusually low Treasury yields.

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...

We estimate the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, we exploit a natural experiment involving a change in a government-imposed...