The Federal Reserve uses (reverse) auctions to implement its purchases of Treasury bonds in quantitative easing. To evaluate dealers' offers across multiple bonds, the Fed relies on its internal yield-curve model, fitted to secondary market bond prices. From November 2010 to September 2011, a...

Interest rate variance risk premium (IRVRP), the difference between implied and realized variances of interest rates, emerges as a strong predictor of Treasury bond returns of maturities ranging between one and ten years for return horizons up to six months. IRVRP is not subsumed by other...

We show that the beta with respect to an index of global ex-ante tail risk concerns (GRIX), which we construct using out-of-the-money options on multiple global assets, negatively drives cross-sectional return variations across asset classes, including international equity indices, foreign...

We find hedge funds that have higher return covariation with a disaster concern index, which we construct using out-of-the-money puts on sector indices, earn significantly higher returns. These funds have better skills in exploiting the market's ex ante rare disaster concerns (SED) that are not...

Using both S&P 500 option and recently introduced VIX option prices, we study pricing kernels and their dependence on multiple volatility factors. We first propose nonparametric estimates of marginal pricing kernels, conditional on the VIX and the slope of the variance swap term structure. Our...

Agency mortgage-backed securities trade simultaneously in a market for specified pools (SPs) and in the to-be-announced (TBA) forward market. TBA trading creates liquidity by allowing thousands of different MBS to be traded in a handful of TBA contracts. SPs that are eligible to be traded as...

This paper investigates how the network of relationships between dealers shapes their trading behavior in the corporate bond market. We show that dealers tend to provide liquidity during periods of distress to the counterparties with whom they have the strongest tie. However, highly connected...

We dissect the fine structure of volatility risks, as an important component of time-varying investment opportunities, by studying returns on VIX option portfolios. In particular, we provide model-free evidence regarding the two leading channels in modeling volatility risks: stochastic...

Bond returns are time-varying and predictable. What economic forces drive this variation? To answer this long-standing question, we propose a consumption-based model with recursive preferences, long-run risks, and inflation non-neutrality. Our model offers two important insights. First, our...

Two intermediary-based factors - a broad financial distress measure and a dealer corporate bond inventory measure - explain about 50% of the puzzling common variation of credit spread changes beyond canonical structural factors. A simple model, in which intermediaries facing margin constraints...