What explains the sharp movements of the yield curve in response to major U.S. macroeconomic announcements? To answer this question, we estimate an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model with macroeconomic fundamentals as risk factors. We assume that the yield curve reacts to announcements...

We investigate the movements of the yield curve after the release of major U.S. macroeconomic announcements through the lenses of an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model with macroeconomic fundamentals. Combining estimated yield responses obtained using high-frequency data with model...

Credit risk pricing models assume recovery to be at its historical average (historical recovery assumption). However, the effect of this assumption is not completely understood. The heart of this thesis lies in constructing a new pricing model for Credit Default Swaps (CDS), in particularly...

We investigate the movements of the yield curve after the release of major U.S. macroeconomic announcements through the lenses of an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model with macroeconomic fundamentals. Combining estimated yield responses obtained using high-frequency data with model...

There continues to be substantial interest in models combining heterogeneous beliefs about asset values with leverage generated by loans from pessimists to the optimistic natural buyers of the asset. This paper determines the size of the interest spread and margin on the loan as a function of...

We show that the difference between the natural rate of interest and the current level of monetary policy stance, which we label Convergence Gap (CG), contains information that is valuable for bond predictability. Adding CG in forecasting regressions of bond excess returns significantly raises...

During 2008, the sudden widening of credit spreads led to a rapid decrease in the value of many financial assets, revealing a general shortage of capital for many financial institutions, with some critical peaks that required fund injection and public bailouts.The evidence of a substantial...

Investors seek to hedge against interest rate risk by taking long or short positions on bonds ofdifferent maturities. We study changes in risk taking behavior in a low interest rateenvironment by estimating a market stochastic discount factor that is non-linear and thereforeconsistent with the...

A regime-switching Levy framework, where all parameter values depend on the value of a continuous time Markov chain as per Chevallier and Goutte (2017), is employed to study US Corporate Option-Adjusted Spreads (OASs). For modelling purposes we assume a Normal Inverse Gaussian distribution,...

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...