This working paper comments on Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider's 'Bond Positions, Expectations, and the Yield Curve', delivered at the Fiscal Policy and Monetary/Fiscal Policy Interactions conference held at the Atlanta Fed on April 19-20, 2007.

This paper implements a structural model of the yield curve with data on nominal positions and survey forecasts. Bond prices are characterized in terms of investors' current portfolio holdings as well as their subjective beliefs about future bond payoffs. Risk premia measured by an...

This paper employs a Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) consistent shadow-rate model to decompose UK nominal yields into expectation and term premia components. Compared to a standard affine term structure model, it performs relatively better in a ZLB setting and effectively captures the countercyclical...

The strong response of long-term interest rates to macroeconomic shocks has typically been explained in terms of informational asymmetries between the central bank and private agents. The standard models assume that the equilibrium real interest rate is constant over time and independent of...

The traditional view of the monetary transmission mechanism rests on the premise that the Federal Reserve (Fed) controls the level of the Federal funds rate via open market operations and the liquidity effect. By contrast, this paper argues that the Fed also manipulates the Federal funds rate...

Forward guidance provides monetary policy communication for an economy at the effective lower bound (ELB). In this paper, we consider both calendar- and outcome-based forward guidance about the timing of liftoff. We develop a novel macro-finance shadow rate term structure model by introducing...

This chapter reviews some of the academic literature that links nominal and real term structures with the macroeconomy. The main conclusion is that none of our models is consistent with basic properties of nominal yields. It is difficult to explain the average shape of the nominal yield curve,...

This paper challenges two clichés that have dominated the macroeconometric debates in India. One relates to the neoclassical view that deficits are detrimental to growth, as they increase the rate of interest, and in turn displace the interest-rate-sensitive components of private investment....

This paper proposes a forecasting model that combines a factor augmented VAR (FAVAR) methodology with the Nelson and Siegel (NS) parametrization of the yield curve to predict the Brazilian term structure of interest rates. Importantly, we extract the principal components for the FAVAR from a...

This paper shows that greater uncertainty about monetary policy can lead to a decline in nominal interest rates. In the context of a limited participation model, monetary policy uncertainty is modeled as a mean-preserving spread in the distribution for the money growth process. This increase in...