In the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the debt crisis in the euro area yields on German federal bonds have been exceptionally low. This analysis tries to calculate the profits that the federal government makes due to the low yields. The interest payments that are due to emissions of...

This paper aims at understanding the dynamics of sectarian violence in the city of Beirut, by looking at the early phase of violence in the Lebanese civil war (1975-90), and the process of dividing Beirut into various sectarian enclaves controlled by the warring militias. The paper aims to show...

This paper suggests a term structure model which parsimoniously exploits a broad macroeconomic information set. The model does not incorporate latent yield curve factors, but instead uses the common components of a large number of macroeconomic variables and the short rate as explanatory...

We analyse high-frequency changes in the euro area money market yield curve on dates when the ECB regularly sets and communicates decisions on policy interest rates to construct different indicators of monetary policy news relating to policy decisions and to central bank communication. The...

This paper proposes a procedure to investigate the nature and persistence of the forces governing the yield curve and to use the extracted information for forecasting purposes. The latent factors of a model of the Nelson-Siegel type are directly linked to the maturity of the yields through the...

This paper attempts to extract market expectations about the Japanese economy and the BOJ’s policy stance from the yen yield curves augmented by money market interest rates, during the period from the end of the quantitative easing policy in March 2006. We use (i) the swap yield curves...

The efficient rate of return of a zero-coupon bond with maturity t is determined by our expectations about the mean (+), variance (-) and skewness (+) of the growth of aggregate consumption between 0 and t. The shape of the yield curve is thus determined by how these moments vary with t. We...

Pricing and hedging of long-term interest rate sensitive products require to extrapolate the term structure beyond observable maturities. For the resulting limiting term structure we show two results by postulating no arbitrage in a bond market with infinitely increasing maturities: long...