The collapse of Japanese asset prices in the 1990s sharply reduced the wealth of Japanese banks and life insurers and slowed their international activity. This article traces the channels through which wealth changes altered these intermediaries' growth, pricing, and portfolio strategies. The...

The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting...

Press releases announcing and explaining monetary policy decisions play a critical role in the communication strategy of central banks. Because of their market-moving potential, it is particularly important how they are drafted. Often, central banks start from the previous statement and update...

Specifications of the Federal Reserve target rate that have more realistic features mitigate in-sample over-fitting and are favored in the data. Imposing a positivity constraint and discrete increments significantly increases the accuracy of model out-of-sample forecasts for the level and...

Equilibrium bond-pricing models rely on inflation being bad news for future growth to generate upward-sloping nominal yield curves. We develop a model that can generate upward-sloping nominal and real yield curves by instead using ambiguity about inflation and growth. Ambiguity can help resolve...

We compare the Federal Reserve's asset purchase programs with those implemented by the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank, and the Swiss National Bank's reserve expansion program. We decompose government bond yields into (i) an expectations component, (ii) a global term premium and (iii) a...

During and after the Great Recession of 2008-09, conventional monetary policy in the United States and many other advanced economies was constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Several central banks implemented large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs, more...

The Canadian overnight repo market persistently shows signs of latent funding pressure around month-end periods. Both the overnight repo rate and Bank of Canada liquidity provision tend to rise in these windows. This paper proposes three non-mutually exclusive hypotheses to explain this...

Some key features in the historical dynamics of U.S. Treasury bond yields-a trend in long-term yields, business cycle movements in short-term yields, and a level shift in yield spreads-pose serious challenges to existing equilibrium asset pricing models. This paper presents a new equilibrium...

Recent findings on the term structure of equity and bond yields pose serious challenges to existing models of equilibrium asset pricing. This paper presents a new equilibrium model of subjective expectations to explain the joint historical dynamics of equity and bond yields (and their yield...