A well-documented empirical result is that market expectations extracted from futures contracts on the federal funds rate are among the best predictors for the future course of monetary policy. We show how this information can be exploited to produce accurate forecasts of bond excess returns and...

This paper proposes a generalized arbitrage-free macro finance term structure model with both Nelson-Siegel latent yield factors and observable macro factors. Two subclasses are derived: spanned and unspanned models. In the spanned model, the yields are determined by both the Nelson-Siegel yield...

We derive the discrete-time arbitrage-free Nelson-Siegel class of term structure models with an exact solution and proof of uniqueness. We design a fast and reliable estimation procedure based on reduced-dimension optimization with multistep embedded regressions. After an analytical...

We characterize the discrete-time arbitrage-free Nelson-Siegel term structure model, prove the uniqueness of the solution for model identification, make specification analysis on its canonical form, and detail the MCMC estimation method with a fast and reliable prior extraction step. Using the...

Using the government's intertemporal budget constraint, we quantify the contribution of returns paid on the U.S. government's debt portfolio to the evolution of the debt-to-GDP ratio. We show that announcements of unconventional monetary policy measures by the Federal Reserve between 2008.IV and...