The endeavor to understand bond returns and the term structure of interest rates has generated an extensive literature, ranging from papers on return predictability and affine term structure models to theoretical contributions in the form of equilibrium models. While most of the empirical...

This paper studies the impact of ambiguous information regarding future interest rates on bond prices. A simple bond-pricing model with ambiguity aversion shows that positive bond uncertainty premiums exist, and the interest rate ambiguity affects the term structure of interest rates and yield...

Close-to-zero interest rates challenge standard economic models in which zero lower bound (ZLB) is absent. We estimate a recursive utility model which features time-varying latent expected real growth, expected inflation, and stochastic inflation volatility. Using an approximate solution to bond...

Using market prices of inflation-linked bonds and nominal bonds issued by the French Treasury, both the real and nominal zero coupon curves are estimated from January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2015. Several methods are applied to extract zero coupon bond prices: bootstrapping, a piecewise constant...

Conditional yield skewness is an important summary statistic of the state of the economy. It exhibits pronounced variation over the business cycle and with the stance of monetary policy, and a tight relationship with the slope of the yield curve. Most importantly, variation in yield skewness has...

We build a novel macro-finance model that combines a semi-structural macroeconomic module with arbitrage-free yield-curve dynamics. We estimate it for the United States and the euro area using a Bayesian approach and jointly infer the real equilibrium interest rate (r*), trend inflation (π*),...

Conditional yield skewness is an important summary statistic of the state of the economy. It exhibits pronounced variation over the business cycle and with the stance of monetary policy, and a tight relationship with the slope of the yield curve. Most importantly, variation in yield skewness has...

The standard way to summarize the yield curve is to use the first three principal components of the yield curve, resulting in level, slope and curvature factors. Yields, however, are non-stationary. We analyze the first three principal components of yield changes, which correspond to changes in...

Recent findings on the term structure of equity and bond yields pose serious challenges to existing equilibrium asset pricing models. This paper presents a new equilibrium model to explain the joint historical dynamics of equity and bond yields (and their yield spreads). Equity/bond yields...

Changes in credit supply induce large and frequent variations in households' access to unsecured debt. They generate a novel financial precautionary motive, which compounds the classical motive associated with idiosyncratic income risk, as borrowers accumulate risk-free bonds to hedge against...