This paper estimates the impact of the Federal Reserve’s 2008–2011 quantitative easing (QE) program on the US term structure of interest rates. We estimate an arbitrage-free term structure model that explicitly includes the quantity impact of the Fed’s trades on Treasury market prices. As...

In a frictionless and competitive economy, where high frequency (HF) traders possess no market power, this paper characterizes necessary and sufficient conditions on the price process and information sets for HF traders to earn abnormal trading profits. Two sufficient conditions shown to...

This paper uses a conditional law of large numbers and a conditional central limit theorem to provide simplified asymptotic valuation formulas for credit derivatives on baskets, including synthetic and cash-flow CDOs. In particular, approximate pricing procedures are provided for synthetic and...

This paper shows that the standard textbook formula for computing the present value of a future random cash flow – the discounted expected value – is formally incorrect and can generate significant errors when used to compute present values. The correct present value method is provided as...

In spite of the popularity of model calibration in finance, empirical researchers have put more emphasis on model estimation than on the equally important goodness-of-fit problem.This is due partly to the ignorance of modelers, and more to the ability of existing statistical tests to detect...