This paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. The topic is important to investors and also to policymakers, who wish to extract macroeconomic expectations...

We study the problem of extracting the state price densities from the market prices of listed options. Adapting a model of Madan and Milne to a multiple expiration setting, we present an estimation method for the risk-neutral probability at a moving horizon of fixed length. With the exception of...

This paper reconstructs the series of the real returns on Italian equities, bank and PO deposits and long-term government bonds from 1860 to today. In the long-run the return on shares was much higher than that on government securities and also that on bank and PO deposits. However, this summary...

This paper uses Garch models to estimate the objective and risk-neutral density functions of financial asset prices and, by comparing their shapes, recover detailed information on economic agents' attitudes toward risk. It differs from recent papers investigating analogous issues because it uses...

We study the representative consumer's risk attitude and efficient risk-sharing rules in a single-period, single-good economy in which consumers have homogeneous probabilistic beliefs but heterogeneous risk attitudes. We prove that if all consumers have convex absolute risk tolerance, so must...

We develop a methodology for improving the estimate of the risk premia calculated jointly with the asset sensitivities, extending the McElroy-Burmeister approach for estimating the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (Ross 1976) as a restricted nonlinear multivariate regression model using observed...

Present value calculations require predictions of cash flows both at near and distant future points in time. Such predictions are generally surrounded by considerable uncertainty and may critically depend on assumptions about parameter values as well as the form and stability of the data...

This paper provides a framework for an empirical analysis of the scope for cost minimization in public debt management. It assumes that a debt manager aims at minimizing the expected cost of government’s debt portfolio for a given level of short term interest rate and subject to a number of...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the efficiency of the UK debt management authorities' (DMA) behaviour from a cost minimisation perspective over the period January 1985 to March 1995. During this period, the maturity structure of the government's bond portfolio was subject to...

This paper sets out to address the issue of equity duration, one of several risk measures available for asset and liability management. Equity duration, as derived from the use of traditional dividend discount models, results in extremely long duration estimated for equities - often in excess of...