In the past few years, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has been using forward guidance about the federal funds rate in a more explicit way than ever before. This paper explores the market reaction to the forward guidance, with particular focus on the use of calendar dates and economic...

Linearized New Keynesian models and empirical no-arbitrage macro-finance models offer little insight regarding the implications of changes in bond term premiums for economic activity. We investigate these implications using both a structural model and a reduced-form framework. We show that there...

The discount function, which determines the value of all future nominal payments, is the most basic building block of finance and is usually inferred from the Treasury yield curve. It is therefore surprising that researchers and practitioners do not have available to them a long history of...

This paper reviews the U.S. experience with inflation-indexed debt. To date, Treasury inflation-indexed securities have not been highly valued by investors, with the spread between the yields on nominal and inflation-indexed securities falling consistently below most measures of long-run...

This paper demonstrates that long-term forward interest rates in the U.S. often react considerably to surprises in macroeconomic data releases and monetary policy announcements. This behavior is inconsistent with the assumption of many macroeconomic models that the long-run properties of the...

The growth of the mortgage market in recent years has raised the question of what effects, if any, the hedging of mortgage portfolios has on the behavior of long-term interest rates. This paper finds that the volatility of the ten-year swap rate implied by swaptions increases when the prepayment...

This article describes the evolution of Treasury inflation-indexed debt securities (TIIS) since their introduction in 1997. Over most of this period, TIIS yields have been surprisingly high relative to those on comparable nominal Treasury securities, with the spread between the nominal and...

Movements in the prices of different assets are likely to directly influence one another. This paper develops a model that identifies the contemporaneous interactions between asset prices in U.S. financial markets by relying on the heteroskedasticity in their movements. In particular, we...

Estimating the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy is complicated by the endogeneity of policy decisions and the fact that both interest rates and asset prices react to numerous other variables. This paper develops a new estimator that is based on the heteroskedasticity that...