Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) are frequently thought of as risk-free real bonds. Using no-arbitrage term structure models, we show that TIPS yields exceeded risk-free real yields by as much as 100 basis points when TIPS were first issued and up to 300 basis points during the...

We estimate a medium-scale macro-finance DSGE model of the term structure. By expanding the macro part of macro-finance models, historical fluctuations in US bond yields turn out to be largely consistent with the rational expectations hypothesis. This stands in contrast to extant macro-finance...

We empirically investigate whether the relationship between interest rates and public deficits/debt may be nonlinear for the U.S. Using threshold estimation, we find evidence of level-dependent effects on interest rates, implying a significant effect of projected deficits and debt in the U.S....

This paper addresses two important questions that have, so far, been studied separately in the literature. First, the paper aims at explaining the high volatility of long-term interest rates observed in the data, which is hard to replicate using standard macro models. Building a small-scale...

US government indebtedness and fiscal deficits increased notably following the global financial crisis. Yet long-term interest rates and US Treasury yields have remained remarkably low. Why have long-term interest rates stayed low despite the elevated government indebtedness? What are the...

This note examines the stochastic behaviour of US monthly 10-year government bond yields. Specifically, it estimates a fractional integration model suitable to capture both persistence and non-linearities, these being two important properties of interest rates. Two series are analysed, one from...

How does access to banking services affect small firms in highly developed countries? We exploit the unique legal situation of the U.S. marijuana industry that benefits from the superior institutional environment in terms of legal protection and the labor market but has no access to bank lending...

The study documented in this paper utilises a probit regression analysis to empirically investigate the key macroeconomic factors that influence credit risk in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market. By aggregating the United States (US) state-level data with LendingClub’s loan book covering...