Central banks normally accept debt of their own governments as collateral in liquidity operations without reservations. This gives rise to a valuable liquidity premium that reduces the cost of government finance. The ECB is an interesting exception in this respect. It relies on external...

We construct a factor model of the yield curve and specify time series processes forthese factors, so that the innovations are mutually orthogonal. At the same time,the factors are constructed in such a way that they assume clear, intuitive interpretations.The resulting “intelligible...

We extend the Lucas asset pricing tree economy to a heterogeneous population.Perturbative methods are applied to explicitly calculate the secondorder response of asset returns to heterogeneity. We discover thatthere exists a unique "best homogeneous approximation" to a weakly...