We present an empirical study of the pricing effect of liquidity in the credit default swaps (CDS) market. We construct liquidity proxies to capture various facets of CDS liquidity including adverse selection, search frictions, and inventory costs. We show that the liquidity effect on CDS...

We analyze a six-factor model for Treasury bonds, corporate bonds, and swap rates and decompose swap spreads into three components: A convenience yield from holding Treasuries, a credit risk element from the underlying LIBOR rate, and a factor specific to the swap market. The convenience yield...

We study a structural model that allows us to examine how credit spreads are affected by the interaction of macroeconomic conditions and firm characteristics. Unlike most other structural models, our model explicitly incorporates equilibrium macroeconomic dynamics and models a firm's cash flow...

We study the effects of incorporating incomplete information in the recently developed long run risks model of asset pricing. Studying the effects of incomplete information in such a setting is tractable, especially in the homoskedastic case with no fluctuating economic uncertainty. The...

Exotic interest rate derivatives are hard to value. Care must be taken to make sure that sources of volatility that impact the contingent claim are properly modeled, and that appropriate relationships are maintained between the underlying rates involved.In this presentation, we outline the...

This paper reexamines the issue of unspanned stochastic volatility (USV) in bond markets and the puzzle of the poor relative pricing between bonds and bond options. I make a distinction between the weak USV and the strong USV scenarios, and analyze the evidence for each of them. I argue that the...

The evolution of the yields of different maturities is related and can be described by a reduced number of commom latent factors. Multifactor interest rate models of the finance literature, common factor models of the time series literature and others use this property. Each model has advantages...

The Federal Reserve adjusts the target federal funds rate discretely, causing discontinuity in short-term interest rates. However, unlike random Poisson jumps, these adjustments are well anticipated by the market. Within the affine term structure framework, we incorporate an anticipated jump...

We offer clarifications on Cooley and Quadrini (2001) regarding financial frictions and risky corporate-debt pricing. Even in a frictionless world, the promised rate on corporate debt is not identical across firms and across capital structures and it is not equal to the risk-free rate. Frictions...

Polynomial splines are popular in the estimation of discount bond term structures, but suffer from well-documented problems with spurious inflection points, excessive convexity, and lack of locality in the effects of input price perturbations. In this paper, we address these issues through the...