Opportunistic politicians use the composition of public debt as a signal for competence. A competent government will not issue long-term nominal debt, as optimal to balance the budget, but long-term inflation-indexed debt. We consider politicians that pursue the objective of a balanced budget...

In the first essay, I decompose inflation risk into (i) a part that is correlated with real returns on the market portfolio and factors that determine investor’s preferences and investment opportunities and (ii) a residual part. I show that only the first part earns a risk premium. All...

This study deals with the pricing and hedging of inflation-indexed bonds. Under foreign exchange analogy we model the nominal short rate, real short rate and logarithm of the price index with an affi ne Gaussian process. Using the underlying a ffine property, we compute the nominal and...