This paper analyzes influences on the credit standing of Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), specifically the quality, diversification and single name concentration of their portfolios, and on the market practice known as Preferred Creditor Status (PCS), whereby sovereigns that default on...

The low liquidity showed in the evolution of Alternative Markets for expanding firms has caused a great concern among practitioners. The debate arises: Is it this lack of liquidity a market maturity matter? Would liquidity arise itself with more companies going public and more investors trading?...

We discover a novel monetary policy shock that has a widespread impact on aggregate financial conditions. Our shock can be summarized by the response of long-horizon yields to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements; not only is it orthogonal to changes in the near-term path of policy...

We explore the term structures of claims to a variety of cash flows: U.S. government bonds (claims to dollars), foreign government bonds (claims to foreign currency), inflation-adjusted bonds (claims to the price index), and equity (claims to future equity indexes or dividends). Average term...

How much do term premiums matter for explaining the dynamics of the term structure of interest rates? A lot. We characterize the expected path of nominal and real short-rates as well as inflation using the universe of U.S. surveys of professional forecasters covering more than 500 survey-horizon...

We study how the Indian government bond market functions, how it has changed over time, and what factors help explain some of its features. Looking at the primary market, we describe how underwriting obligations are allocated to primary dealers via auction and identify several significant...

We estimate a highly significant price of risk that forecasts global stock and bond returns as a nonlinear function of the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX). We show that countries' exposure to the global price of risk is related to macroeconomic risks as measured by output, credit, and inflation...

Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

Ongoing demographic change will lead to a relative scarcity of raw labor to the effect that output growth will be decreasing in the next decades, a secular stagnation. As physical capital will be relatively abundant, this decrease of output will be accompanied by reductions of asset returns. We...