Monetary policy measures taken by the Federal Reserve as a response to the 2007-09 financial crisis and subsequent economic conditions led to a large increase in the level of outstanding reserves. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has a range of tools to control short-term market rates in...

This paper provides a study of bond yield differentials among EU government bonds issued between 1993 and 2005 on the basis of a unique dataset of issue spreads in the US and DM (Euro) bond market. Interest differentials between bonds issued by EU countries and Germany or the USA contain risk...

This paper explains the emergence of liquidity traps in the aftermath of large-scale financial crises, as happened in the US 1930s, Japan 1990s and recently in the US and Europe. The paper introduces a new balance sheet channel that links equity capital to the risk-free interest rate. When...

Explanations of why changes in the relative quantities of safe debt seem to affect asset prices often appeal informally to a portfolio balance mechanism. I show how this type of effect can be incorporated in a general class of structural, arbitrage-free asset-pricing models using a numerical...

This paper analyses the determinants and effects of ECB interventions in times of severe distress. We focus on the Greek government bond market in mid-2010 and use a unique new dataset to show, for the first time, what type of bonds the ECB bought. We then explore the short-term effects of ECB...

We study the yields in the German treasury bills market. We take a detailed look at the yield banks require to buy treasury bills in the primary market, and we also examine the yield households and nonbank firms demand to buy these bills in the secondary market. We use data from real world...

We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk. The cross-country high-minuslow (HML) conditional skewness of the unemployment gap—our measure of global macroeconomic uncertainty—is a factor that...

We construct a slope factor from changes in federal funds futures of different horizons. Slope predicts stock returns at the weekly frequency: faster monetary policy easing positively predicts excess returns. Investors can achieve increases in weekly Sharpe ratios of 20% conditioning on the...

A consistent empirical feature of bond yields is that term premia are, on average, positive. The majority of theoretical explanations for this observation have viewed the term premia through the lens of the consumption based capital asset pricing model. In contrast, we harken to an older...

Der seit der Finanzkrise steile Anstieg der Zinsdifferenzen zwischen europäischen Staatsanleihen bringt mehrere Mitgliedsländer der europäischen Währungsunion (EWU) unter erhebliche Refinanzierungsschwierigkeiten und wirft die Frage nach den Ursachen auf. Dieser Bericht fasst die Ergebnisse...