This study examines the ability of government bond fund managers to time the bond market, based on their monthly or quarterly holdings of Treasury securities during the period 1997-2006. We nd that, on average, government bond funds exhibit signi cantly positive timing ability at the one-month...

We show that credit risk accounts for only a small fraction of yield spreads for investment-grade bonds of all maturities, with the fraction lower for bonds of shorter maturities, and that it accounts for a much higher fraction of yield spreads for high yield bonds. This conclusion is shown to...

Insurance firms are a key player in the corporate bond market. In this study, we consider the role of life insurers as "rainy day" liquidity providers who improve liquidity in stressful conditions due to the nature of long-term buy-and-hold investments. To this end, we present evidence that...

Hedge funds often hold illiquid assets whose true value is slowly reflected in reported returns. As a result, reported returns of a hedge fund can become a smoothed version of its true realized returns and, thus, can bias the evaluation of hedge fund performance. To address this problem, we...

We show that credit risk accounts for only a small fraction of the observed corporate-Treasury yield spreads for investment grade bonds of all maturities, with the fraction smaller for bonds of shorter maturities; and that it accounds for a much higher fraction of yield spreads for junk bonds....

In this paper, we present a new method for pricing and hedging American options along with an efficient implementation procedure. The proposed method is efficient and accurate in computing both option values and various option hedge parameters. We demonstrate the computational accuracy and...

We analyze the specifications of option pricing models based on time-changed Levy processes. We classify option pricing models based on the structure of the jump component in the underlying return process, the source of stochastic volatility, and the specification of the volatility process...

In this paper, we examine the dynamic behavior of credit spreads on corporate bond portfolios. We propose an econometric model of credit spreads that incorporates portfolio rebalancing, the near unit root property of spreads, the autocorrelation in spread changes, the ARCH conditional...