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We build a model of bond yields in an economy with secular changes to inflation, real rate, and output growth. Long-run restrictions identify nominal shocks that do not influence the long-run real rate and output growth. Before the anchoring of inflation around the mid-1990s, nominal shocks lifted the output gap and inflation. This led to a higher and steeper yield curve because the short rate was expected to peak after several quarters, following declines in the responses of growth and inflation. With inflation anchored, nominal shocks have small impacts on inflation, output, and bond yields, mostly via the term premium.

This paper investigates spillovers from foreign economies to the U.S. through changes in longterm Treasury yields. We document a decline in the contribution of U.S. domestic news to the variance of long-term Treasury yields and an increased importance of overnight yield changes—a rough proxy for the contribution of foreign shocks to U.S. yields—over the past decades. Using a model that identifies U.S., Euro area, and U.K. shocks that move global yields, we estimate that foreign (non-U.S.) shocks account for at least 20 percent of the daily variation in long-term U.S. yields in recent years. We argue that spillovers occur in large part through bond term premia by showing that a low level of foreign yields relative to U.S. yields predicts a decline in distant forward U.S. yields and higher returns on a strategy that is long on a long-term Treasury security and short on a long-term foreign bond.

We assess the impact of news concerning recent Japanese monetary reforms on long-term inflation expectations using an arbitrage-free term structure model of nominal and real yields. Our model accounts for the value of deflation protection embedded in Japanese inflation-indexed bonds issued since 2013, which is sizable and time-varying. Our results suggest that Japanese long-term inflation expectations have remained positive despite extensive spells of deflation, leaving inflation risk premia mostly negative during this period. Moreover, adjusting for deflation protection demonstrates that market responses to policy changes were not as inflationary as they appear under standard modeling procedures. Consequently, the reforms were less “disappointing” than is widely perceived.

Since 2020, the world is facing a huge pandemic crisis caused by an acute respiratory coronavirus syndrome. Beyond the impact on the population's health or on normal social interaction, the virus led to a huge economic slowdown, requiring the prompt EMU's authority's reaction. The current paper explores how the sovereign yield spreads of EMU countries with respect to German bonds were affected during the pandemic period. To this end, I employ dynamic panel methods, the Pooled Mean Group estimator of Pesaran et al. (1999) and the Dynamic Common Correlated Effects estimator of Chudik and Pesaran (2015), which accounts for heterogeneous effects across countries and the non-stationarity of spreads and of their determinants. The model uncertainty is studied with a Bayesian VAR (BVAR) approach. The results reveal that, in addition to fundamentals (economic growth, large public debt, inflation, financial instability, country's competitiveness and domestic investment), pandemic risk puts also substantial upward pressure on sovereign bond yields both, in the long-run and short-run on the selected period. Pandemic risk seems to raise yield spreads in the 14 EMU countries in the short-run, while disease mitigation measures reduce them in the long-run. Same negative effect of disease mitigation measures on yield spreads are also found with BVAR model. Results are relatively robust across different empirical methods and considered scenarios.

This paper studies an optimal investment and benefit adjustment problem for a target benefit pension plan. The pension sponsor can adjust the benefit level to guarantee the stable operation of the plan. The pension is allowed to invest in a risk-free bond and a stock. The weighted product of the benefit outgo and pension wealth is considered in the objective function, which is taken in the form of Cobb-Douglas utility. Thus the plan takes both the benefit level and terminal wealth of the pension into account and then the benefit payment are dependent on the financial situation of the plan. By applying dynamic programming approach, we establish the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and derive the optimal investment-benefit strategy and the value function explicitly. The verification theorem is presented and proved. Furthermore, the recursive utility is considered as an extension and we find that the elasticity of intertemporal substitution has a positive effect on the optimal benefit level. Finally, numerical examples are given and demonstrate that this pension scheme is sustainable and can provide stable and consecutive incremental benefit payment for future generations.

The paper examines statistical and economic evidence of out-of-sample bond return predictability for a real-time Bayesian investor who learns about parameters, hidden states, and predictive models over time. We find some statistical evidence using information contained in forward rates. However, such statistical predictability can hardly generate any economic value for investors. Furthermore, we find that strong statistical and economic evidence of bond return predictability from fully-revised macroeconomic data vanishes when real-time macroeconomic information is used. We also show that highly levered investments in bonds can improve short-run bond return predictability.

Corporate bond prices are slow to respond to default risk and interest rate shocks, as proxied by firm-level stock returns and Treasury returns, respectively. Furthermore, the underreaction is risk-specific: bonds with better credit quality underreact more to default risk, while those with worse quality underreact more to interest rates. The underreactions imply substantial out-of-sample return predictability, and investors appear to be leaving too much money on the table. The results are consistent with behavioral inattention models in which investors endogenously allocate more attention to payoff-relevant (or salient) risks, and they are not explained by traditional trading friction mechanisms.

In recent years, we have lived through times of unprecedented money and credit creation, which has prompted a new interest in the role of money and credit in the economy. In this work, I show that the money multiplier, the ratio of a broad monetary aggregate to a narrow monetary aggregate, captures the rate of money creation in the economy and robustly predicts stock, bond and currency returns. I link the predictive ability of the money multiplier to its economic interpretations as a measure of economy-wide leverage and an alternative measure of money velocity. First, I look at U.S. stock and bond market and show that money multipliers robustly predict stock and bond excess returns over the period January 1959 - December 2015, and are priced in cross-section of stocks. These multipliers remain statistically significant after controlling for outside money growth and other well- understood predictors of stock and bond returns. Then I extend my analysis to currencies. I investigate short-run and long-run relationships between bilateral exchange rates and broad money multipliers of ten countries. I motivate my analysis with the quantity theory of money and find a strong long-run relationship between the exchange rate, relative money velocities, relative money supplies of the two countries and their relative output. I argue that the money multiplier can be seen as an alternative measure for money velocity, as it accounts for propensity to spend money not only on real sector goods and services but on financial assets too.

The recent 50% drop in the price of the flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin reinforces the persistent anxiety among cryptocurrency investors. Can alternative assets hedge Bitcoin risk? This study investigates the ability of equities, commodities, bonds, currencies, and VIX futures to hedge Bitcoin. Our in-sample analysis shows that the USDX, Gilt, Australian dollars, wheat, cocoa, cotton, sugar, copper, and lean hog can hedge Bitcoin, and the out-of-sample analysis reveals that the DAX, Dow-Jones, Nikkei, S&P 500, Brent, and WTI futures can be effective hedging instruments. We use a wavelet-based dynamic hedging model to account for heterogeneous investors in the Bitcoin market. For a short-term horizon, soybean futures reduce the variance in the in-sample hedged portfolio, and cotton futures offer the highest out-of-sample utility. Copper futures are the best for in-sample hedging in a long-term horizon, whereas live cattle futures have the best out-of-sample performance. These results show that conventional assets can hedge wild swings in Bitcoin.

Unexpected inflation devalues nominal government bonds. It must therefore correspond to a decline in expected future surpluses, or a rise in their discount rates, so that the real value of debt equals the present value of surpluses. I measure each component using a vector autoregression, via responses to inflation, recession, surplus and discount rate shocks. Discount rates account for much inflation variation, for the cyclical pattern of inflation, and why persistent deficits often do not cause inflation. Long-term debt is important. In response to a fiscal shock, smooth inflation slowly devalues outstanding long-term bonds.

This paper documents two facts: (i) elasticities of substitution in production vary significantly across sectors, with manufacturing sectors being generally less flexible than service sectors, and (ii) during the Great Recession the rise in bond spreads varied systematically with these elasticities. Specifically, more flexible sectors paid lower spreads during the Great Recession. Moreover, among the less-flexible manufacturing sectors, sectors with relatively high flexibility and high debt saw their spreads rise less than average, while among the more-flexible service sectors the sectors with relatively high flexibility and high debt saw their spreads rise more. We interpret these results using a simple two-sector model with working capital constraints, and show that the model replicates these observations if manufacturing sectors face constraints on their purchases of intermediates while services face constraints on their purchases of labor/capital. The dynamics of intermediate prices and quantities support our results, as does a quantitative investigation of a 62-sector version of the US economy.

We formulate a dynamic no-arbitrage asset pricing model for equities and corporate bonds, featuring time variation in both risk aversion and economic uncertainty. The joint dynamics among cash flows, macroeconomic fundamentals, and risk aversion accommodate both heteroskedasticity and non-Gaussianity. The model delivers measures of risk aversion and uncertainty at the daily frequency. We verify that equity variance risk premiums are very informative about risk aversion, whereas credit spreads and corporate bond volatility are highly correlated with economic uncertainty. Our model-implied risk premiums outperform standard instruments for predicting asset excess returns. Risk aversion is substantially correlated with consumer confidence measures and in early 2020 reacted more strongly to new COVID cases than did an uncertainty proxy. This paper was accepted by Haoxiang Zhu, finance.

In the present work, we study the problem of optimal management of defined contribution pension funds, during the distribution phase, under the effect of inflation, mortality and model uncertainty. More precisely, we consider a class of employees, who, at the time of retirement, enter a life assurance contract with the same insurance firm. The fund manager of the firm collects the entry fees to a portfolio savings account and this wealth is to be invested optimally in a Black–Scholes type financial market. As such schemes usually last for many years, we extend our framework, by: (i) augmenting the financial market with an inflation-adjusted bond, and, (ii) taking into account mortality of the fund members. Model uncertainty aspects are introduced as the fund manager does not fully trust the model he/she faces. By resorting to robust control and dynamic programming techniques, we provide: (a) closed-form solutions for the case of the exponential utility function, (b) a detailed study of the qualitative features of the problem at hand that elucidates the effect of robustness and inflation on the optimal investment decisions.

This paper analyzes the swap-covered interest parity condition by comparing US Treasury bonds with USD-denominated foreign assets replicated using cross-currency basis swaps. We find that the deviations of these yield spreads declined substantially after the financial crisis, suggesting that the swap-covered interest parity still holds. To reconcile our paradoxical findings with the previous literature that insists upon the failure of covered interest parity, we empirically confirm that the regulatory costs of cross-currency basis swaps are cancelled out by the costs of swaps spread under swap-covered interest parity.

This paper proposes a methodology to price bonds jointly issued by a group of countries—Eurobonds in the euro-area context. We consider two types of bonds; the first is backed by several and joint guarantees (SJGs), and the second features several but not joint guarantees (SNJGs). The pricing of SJG and SNJG bonds reflects different assumptions regarding the pooling of debtors’ fiscal resources. We estimate fiscal limits for the six largest euro-area economies over 2008–2021 and deduce counterfactual Eurobond prices. For the five-year maturity, SNJG bond yield spreads would have been about three times larger than SJG ones over the estimation sample. Hence, issuing SJG bonds could result in gains at the aggregate level. Notwithstanding, our model also predicts that gains may temporarily vanish in periods of acute fiscal stress. We finally envision postissuance redistribution schemes, whereby gains stemming from the issuance of SJG bonds could be shared among participating countries; we argue that these schemes may alleviate the reduction in market discipline resulting from common bonds issuance. This paper was accepted by David Sraer, finance. Funding: This work has benefited from financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation [Grant 182293]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4740 .

Eine Rückkaufvereinbarung, wegen des englischen Begriffs repurchase agreeement auch Repo genannt, bezeichnet einen mit Staatsanleihen besicherten, kurzfristigen Kredit zwischen Banken. Der Repo-Markt ist der für die Refinanzierung von Banken wichtigste Markt. Repos spielen daher eine zentrale Rolle für die Allokation von Liquidität und Wertpapieren und für die Implementierung der Geldpolitik. Diese Dissertation ist eine Sammlung von drei Beiträgen zur Struktur und Funktionsweise des europäischen Repo-Marktes. In allgemeinen Repo-Geschäften kann die kreditaufnehmende Bank die als Sicherheit dienende Staatsanleihe aus einer vorgegebenen Liste frei auswählen. Im ersten Kapitel (Collateral choice) analysiere ich, welche Anleihen von Banken ausgewählt werden. Die zuletzt ausgegebene Staatsanleihe wird dabei am häufigsten als Sicherheit verwendet, dies ist überraschend, da es eine besonders hohe Nachfrage nach dieser Anleihe gibt. Diese Beobachtungen reflektiere ich in einem theoretischen Modell, welches einen direkten Zusammenhang zum Anleihenmarkt abbildet. Je nach Staatsanleihe und Marktumfeld ergeben sich verschiedene Zinssätze für Repo-Geschäfte. Im zweiten Kapitel (Safe asset carry trade, gemeinsam verfasst mit Angelo Ranaldo) präsentieren wir die erste systematische Analyse der Bepreisung von Repos. Hauptverantwortlich für Variationen in den Zinssätzen sind dabei Aspekte von Sicherheit und Liquidität, welche sich zwischen den Staatsanleihen unterschieden. Basierend hierauf bilden wir einen Carry, welcher nicht nur für die Bepreisung der Zinssätze im Repo-Markt relevant ist, sondern auch für die Bepreisung von Staatsanleihen im Anleihenmarkt. Ein Repo-Geschäft kann sowohl zum Leihen von Geld als auch zum Beziehen einer Staatsanleihe verwendet werden. Im dritten Kapitel (Money market disconnect, gemeinsam verfasst mit Angelo Ranaldo und Hannah Winterberg) dokumentieren wir, dass sich der besicherte Repo-Markt vom unbesicherten Geldmarkt entkoppelt, wenn in Repo-Geschäften das Motiv des Beziehens einer Staatsanleihe im Vordergrund steht. Zwei Aspekte des geldpolitischen Rahmenwerks haben zu dieser Entkoppelung beigetragen: der Zugang zu Zentralbankeinlagen und die Bedingungen für den Ankauf von Staatsanleihen durch die Zentralbank. Unsere Ergebnisse sind für die Analyse verschiedener geldpolitischer Massnahmen von Bedeutung., The repurchase agreement (repo) market is the primary short-term funding market; it plays a key role in the efficient allocation of liquidity and financial securities and is crucial for the implementation of monetary policy. This dissertation is a collection of three research essays on the structure and functioning of the euro area repo market.

The share of wealth held by the top one percent of Americans has increased from about 24% in 1980 to 40% in 2010. This paper examines the potential role played by three factors in accounting for this increase - decline in the corporate tax rates, increase in the income risk, and the decline in the world interest rates. Our model consists of altruistic households who either run a business or work for others. Entrepreneurial households enjoy high returns due to high productivity while worker households' savings earn the bank deposit rate that is determined in a competitive banking sector and equals the rate of return on foreign bonds. We find that entrepreneurship and intergenerational links via altruism are important factors generating a wealth distribution that mimics the data in the 2000s. However, it is the decline in the interest rate that plays a major role in accounting for the increase in the U.S. wealth inequality since the 1980s. In our model, the decline in the interest rate increases wealth inequality as it affects the two types of households differently. Entrepreneurial households benefit from lower financing costs and increase their investments while worker households face lower returns to their savings as the interest rate declines. Other changes such as the changes in taxation and income risk play a less significant role.

The global epidemic of COVID-19 has made a huge impact on global health and financial markets. And the spread of the virus has stalled economic development in many parts of the world. As stocks and bonds are two important financial assets, How to take appropriate economic policies to restore the stock and bond markets is the focus of governments as they are seeking for quick recovery. Based on the Event Study method and the GARCH model, data from 1 October 2019 to 1 April 2020 were collected from 26 countries as analytic samples. The results show: 1) COVID-19 has made greater impacts on the stock market than the bond market; 2) the economic policy responses after the COVID-19 has brought impacts on both of the stock and the bond markets; 3) the monetary policy responses has brought greater volatility to the stock market than the fiscal policy responses, while the fiscal policy responses has brought greater volatility to the bond market than the monetary policy, 4) the fiscal policy has brought more positive effects on the stock market, and monetary policy has brought more positive effects on the bond market. This research is helpful to understand the mechanism of COVID-19′s impacts on the stock and bond market. And it is of great practical significance to the governments’ decisions to make economic policy responses after an epidemic.

Safe assets are demanded as stores of value (to smooth consumption inter-temporally) and as collateral (to facilitate credit intra-temporally). Some are supplied publicly (government bonds) and some privately (asset-backed securities). Private assets are heterogeneous in quality, and information about their quality reduces their safety properties. We show that government bonds discourage both production of (crowding quantity out) and information about (crowding safety in) private assets. Hence, the optimal supply of government bonds need to take into account their dual roles and their impact on the quantity and informational content of private assets.

We analyze state-dependent and asymmetric behavior of emerging market (EM) sovereign bond spreads in response to changes in global risk appetite and liquidity. We use dynamic Markov-switching, fixed-effect panel threshold, and time-varying causality analyses along with our research setting. Empirical results provide evidence for both state-dependent and asymmetric behavior of EM sovereign spreads. We also find that these behaviors became even more pronounced after the global financial crisis (GFC). EM external debt markets display more sensitivity to good news in the post-GFC era. Global liquidity's impact on EM sovereign spreads displays a more complicated dynamic than the global risk appetite.

We consider the influence of domestic and US macroeconomic news surprises on a daily bond yields over the January 1999 to January 2018 period for four advanced Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP) economies – Germany, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland. Our results suggest that the influence of macroeconomic news surprises is for all four countries under study during the NIRP period non-existent or noticeably weaker than during the preceding Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) period. Our results are consistent with the suggestion that NIRP is characterized by a lower bound that is no less constraining than the zero lower bound that characterizes ZIRP.

We study the preferential treatment of green bonds in the Central Bank collateral framework as an environmental policy instrument within a DSGE model with environmental and financial frictions. Green and conventional entrepreneurs issue bonds to banks that use them as collateral. The associated collateral premium induce entrepreneurs to increase bond issuance, investment, leverage, and default risk. Collateral policy solves a trade-off between increasing collateral supply, adverse effects on entrepreneur risk-taking, and subsidizing green investment. Due to these adverse side effects, optimal collateral policy is characterized by modest preferential treatment, thereby increasing the green bond share and, to a smaller extent, the green investment share, which in turn reduces pollution. The limited response of green investment is directly related to higher risk-taking of green entrepreneurs. Furthermore, we show that preferential treatment is an imperfect substitute of Pigouvian taxation on pollution: only if the optimal tax can not be implemented, optimal collateral policy features preferential treatment of green bonds.

As in the previous chapters, we consider a market model consisting in two assets: one non-risky (bond), the other risky (stock). While before we focused on discrete-time market models, here we introduce the so-called Black-Scholes model : a well-known example of continuous-time market model.

I construct a monetary model with agents that face idiosyncratic shocks to how they discount future utility. Once shocks are revealed, agents trade money for bonds in a financial market, then money for goods in a goods market, and finally move into the next time period. Away from the Friedman rule, money is scarce so that those who turn out to care little about the future, sell bonds at a discount to obtain money for immediate consumption—in the financial market, they reduce the savings value of their asset portfolio to obtain more liquid asset positions. This generates a net re-distribution of savings from agents that attach a low value to the future, to agents that attach a high value to the future. Ex-ante utility increases because losing savings when the future has low value, is dominated by receiving savings when the future has high value. The scarcity of money, however, leads to binding liquidity constraints in the goods market, which reduces ex-ante utility. The financial-market effect can dominate the goods-market effect, in which case the coexistence of money and interest-bearing bonds arises for an optimal policy., Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control, 153, ISSN:0165-1889, ISSN:1879-1743

This paper finds positive evidence of return predictability and investment gains for individual corporate bonds for an extended period from 1973 to 2017. Our sample consists of both public and private company bond observations. We have implemented multiple machine learning methods and designed a Fama-Macbeth-type predictive performance evaluation. In addition to robust predictability evidence, there are four main findings. First of all, we find the lagged corporate bond market return as the most important predictor, suggesting a short-term market reversal story. Second, this paper concludes that equity information is conditionally redundant for similar public and private company bond performance. Third, a model-forecast-implied long-short strategy delivers 1.48% monthly returns and 1.4% alpha during the last two decades, which substantially drops if we do not consider private company bonds. Finally, the return predictability is mainly due to the cash flow component instead of the discount rate component.

We provide time-series and cross-sectional evidence on the significance of a risk-return tradeoff in the bond and equity markets. We find a significantly positive intertemporal relation between expected return and risk in the bond market. We also propose novel measures of systematic and idiosyncratic risk for individual corporate bonds and find a significantly positive cross-sectional relation between systematic risk and expected bond returns, whereas there is no significant link between idiosyncratic risk and future bond returns. We provide an explanation for the significance of systematic (idiosyncratic) risk based on different investor preferences and informational frictions in the bond (equity) market.

We examine the macro-spanning hypothesis for bond returns in international markets. Based on a large panel of real-time macroeconomic variables that are not subject to revisions, we find that global macro factors have predictive power for bond returns unspanned by yield factors. Furthermore, we estimate macro-finance term structure models with the unspanned global macro factors and find that the global macro factors influence the market prices of level and slope risks and induce comovements in forward term premia in global bond markets. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance.

We show that the difference between the natural rate of interest and the current level of monetary policy stance, which we label Convergence Gap (CG), contains information that is valuable for bond predictability. Adding CG in forecasting regressions of bond excess returns significantly raises the R2, and restores countercyclical variation in bond risk premia that is otherwise missed by forward rates. Consistent with the argument that CG captures the effect of real imbalances on the path of rates, our factor has predictive ability for real bond excess returns. The importance of the gap remains robust out-of-sample and in countries other than the United States. Furthermore, its inclusion brings significant economic gains in the context of dynamic conditional asset allocation. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

In this article, the authors propose a systematic approach for pricing and trading municipal bonds, leveraging the feature-rich information available at the individual bond level. Based on the proposed pricing framework, they estimate several models using ridge regression and Kalman filtering. In their empirical work, they show that the models compare favorably in pricing accuracy to those available in the literature. In addition, the models can quickly adapt to changing market conditions. Incorporating the pricing models into relative value trading strategies, the authors demonstrate that the resulting portfolios generate significant excess returns and positive alpha relative to the Vanguard Long-Term Tax-Exempt Fund, one of the largest mutual funds in the municipal space.

Does gross or net debt matter for long-term sovereign spreads in emerging markets? The topic is important for undestanding the borrowing cost implications of public assetliability management decisions (e.g. using assets to lower debt). We investigate this question using data on emerging market economies (EMEs) over the period 1998–2014. We find that both gross debt and assets have a significant impact on long-term sovereign bond spreads in emerging markets, with effects roughly offsetting each other (coefficients of opposite sign and similar magnitude). Hence, net debt seems more appropriate than gross debt when evaluating the impact of indebtedness on spreads. The empirical results suggest that an increase in net debt by 10 percentage points of GDP implies an increase in the spread by 100–120 basis points, and the effect is larger during periods of domestic distress. The key results from this empirical study are quite robust to alternative specifications and subgroups of EMEs.

Purpose The politically unstable economies have high and volatile sovereign spread. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on sovereign bond yields. Design/methodology/approach The sovereign yields at various maturities were decomposed into three factors, namely, level, slope and curvature, using the Dynamic Nelson Siegel model. The relationship between geopolitical uncertainty and the yield curve factors was examined using a quantile causality test. Findings The study found that at the extreme high-rate regime, geopolitical uncertainty causes the yield curve factors positively, indicating bond investors demand a higher return for geopolitical uncertainty. On the other hand, during extreme low-rate regime geopolitical causes the short- and medium-term factors negatively. The extreme low-rate regime indicates the period of economic slowdown. During this regime, the central banks try to reduce the short-term rates to stimulate growth. Originality/value This is one of the few papers that investigates the relationship between the geopolitical risk and sovereign bond yields at the various maturities and interest rate regimes. Understanding the relationship between the geopolitical risk and short-term rates would help the central banks the efficacy of their policy actions. The long-term rates are influenced by the global investor preferences; examining the relationship with the long-term rates would help the investors frame the trading strategies.

The authors examine government bond factor premiums in a deep global sample from 1800 to 2020, spanning the major markets and maturities. Bond factors (value, momen- tum, low risk) offer attractive premiums that do not decay across samples, are persistent over time, and are consistent across various market and macroeconomic scenarios. The factor premiums are diversified to each other, as well as to bond or equity market risks. A combined multifactor bond strategy provides the strongest risk-adjusted returns. These results strongly show a consistent added value of government bond factor premiums over a passive bond portfolio.

Sukuk or Sharia bonds are one of the investment instruments in Indonesia. Since the 19th century, Sukuk has become popular with investors. Several previous studies found contradictory results that macroeconomic variables have a relationship and influence on Sukuk by observing the year before the pandemic. This study uses a quantitative descriptive method with a Vector Autoregression (VAR) approach. Through the optimum lag value, namely, lag 3, statistically it was found that there was a significant relationship between the variables of GDP, interest rates, and the exchange rate on Sukuk. In addition, several analysis results found a causal relationship between these variables.

The deleterious effect of debt restructuring on banks’ balance sheets and, consequently, on the economy as a whole has been a key policy issue. This paper studies how post-default fiscal policy interacts with this sovereign-bank loop and shape the response of a model economy. Calibration of the model matches characteristics of the Greek economy at the time of the bond exchange. Debt restructuring in place of higher lump-sum taxation or lower nonproductive government spending harms the economy even if no other cost of default is considered. However, the sovereign-debt loop is less costly to the economy than increases in labor or capital taxes to service debt. Even so, if fiscal policy is too responsive, a crowding-out effect inhibits the recovery of capital markets, hence a more conservative fiscal stance is desirable. Thus, how diabolic the post-default sovereign-bank loop is depends to a large extent on the way fiscal policy responds.

Large movements during the night tend to have a lasting influence on the next trading session. By following the resulting trends, investors can benefit from fluctuations in the returns of major equity indices during the trading session. This study extends recent research on late-day trading and shows that trends are best caught early during the day. Intraday patterns are revealed using machine learning techniques, and new evidence on the origin of trends is presented. The defensive nature of intraday trend strategies is illustrated by considering the business cycle, investigating correlation with government bonds and simulating the impact on a multi-asset portfolio.

We find that Chinese EPU shocks can explain 40% of the cross-sectional variation in bond returns. We also find that Chinese EPU shocks command a significant negative risk premia. In contrast to a strong explanatory power for bond markets, we do not find meaningful pricing power of Chinese EPU for equity markets. We argue and provide supporting empirical evidence that this result is attributable to the fact that Chinese EPU has a strong influence on the U.S. economy mainly during recessions. Overall, our findings suggest that a foreign EPU shock could be a potentially important factor in explaining bond returns.

The market for bourbon whiskey is booming. Demand is so great that bourbon aficionados regularly line up overnight for the chance to purchase a single bottle and high-end bourbons are allocated to consumers via lotteries. The prevalence of such non-price allocation mechanisms, however, leads to reselling in secondary markets. To characterize bourbon secondary markets, we first provide a rich description of how they function. We then use 2011 to 2019 whiskey auction data in a repeat sales regression framework to develop a novel price index for rare and vintage bourbons. Our repeat sales approach suggests that bourbon prices are increasing by about 9.1% per year over our sample period. We complement those estimates by developing a second price index using unique data from an illicit peer-to-peer secondary market that operated on a major social network between 2014 and 2017. Our estimates suggest that price increases are similar, at least during common sample periods, in our auction-house and peer-to-peer settings. We also examine how bourbon’s hedonic characteristics are related to secondary market prices and develop hedonic estimates of annual returns that range between 13.1% and 18.8%. While our sample period is relatively short, when examining bourbon’s potential as an alternative investment we find that the addition of bourbon can improve the risk-return ratio of typical stock/bond portfolios.

We explore the long-run relationship between income risk, inequality, and the macroeconomy in an overlapping-generations model in which households face uncertain streams of labor income and returns on their savings. To manage those risks, households can apportion their savings to a bond, whose return is safe and identical across households, and a productive asset, whose return is uncertain and can differ persistently across households. We find that greater polarization in households’ labor income and returns on their savings generally accentuates households’ demand for risk-free assets and the compensation they require for bearing risk, leading to higher measured income and wealth inequality, a lower risk-free real interest rate, and higher risk premiums. These findings suggest that the factors behind the observed rise in inequality over the past few decades might have contributed to the observed fall in the risk-free real interest rate and widening gap between the risk-free real interest rate and the rate of return on capital. We also find that the magnitude of the decline in the risk-free real interest rate and offsetting rise in risk premiums depend importantly on the source of income polarization, with the effects being especially large when greater inequality is caused by increased dispersion in returns on risky assets. Thus, the macroeconomic implications not only depend on the amount of inequality, but also the source of this inequality.

Strong mutual commitment is typically conceived of as involving a public promise of a life-long bond, but social theorists have posited that external relationship anchors are being replaced with a private meaning of commitment. This narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with ten White British couples in long-term relationships (15+ years) of different forms (married, civil partners, cohabitants) explores the meaning of commitment in contemporary relationships. The findings indicate a loss of importance attached to public promises, with couple relationships instead guided by two distinct commitment narratives, one of which rejects future-oriented promises of a life-long bond. Contrary to individualisation theories, however, relationship trajectories continue to be shaped by social influences. The study raises questions regarding the growth of an alternative moral framework for relationships and suggests theoretical conceptions of commitment are reconsidered in light of changes in contemporary relationship practices.

We investigate whether cryptocurrencies provide diversification benefits to risk averters via a stochastic spanning methodology. We avoid the conceptual and statistical problems of non-stationary returns by providing a modification of the second order stochastic dominance relation and of the related notion of stochastic spanning. These are compatible with a mildly explosive framework for the logarithm prices, along with conditions for asymptotic negligibility of bubbles. In the empirical application, we construct optimal portfolios, both with and without cryptocurrencies, and evaluate their comparative performance both in- and out-of-sample. A conservative modification of a t-test is presented to test the null hypothesis of non-dominance of an optimal portfolio that includes cryptocurrencies over the traditional portfolio of only stocks, bonds and cash. The augmented portfolio is found to be a good diversification option for some risk averse investors in the full sample period and in a sub-period of high cryptocurrency returns.

I show that rising temperatures can detrimentally affect the sovereign creditworthiness of emerging economies. To this end, I collect long-term monthly temperature data of 54 emerging markets. I calculate a country’s temperature deviation from its historical average, which approximates present-day climate change trends. Running regressions from 1994m1-2018m12, I find that higher temperature anomalies lower sovereign bond performances (i.e. increase sovereign risk) significantly for countries that are warmer on average and have lower seasonality. The estimated magnitudes suggest that affected countries likely face significant increases in their sovereign borrowing costs if temperatures continue to rise due to climate change. However, results indicate that stronger institutions can make a country more resilient towards temperature shocks, which holds independent of a country’s climate.

This paper analyzes the effects of including collective action clauses (CACs) and enhanced CACs in international (nondomestic law-governed) sovereign bonds on sovereigns’ borrowing costs, using secondary-market bond yield spreads. Our findings indicate that inclusion of enhanced CACs, introduced in August 2014, is associated with lower borrowing costs for both noninvestment-grade and investment-grade issuers. These results suggest that market participants do not associate the use of CACs and enhanced CACs with borrowers’ moral hazard, but instead consider their implied benefits of an orderly and efficient debt resolution process in case of restructuring.

We employ an affine term structure model with no-arbitrage restrictions and unspanned risk factors to analyse the global and domestic determinants of bond risk premia in four major emerging markets...

Inflation is a perennial threat to the real value of portfolios, even though current inflation rates are low. To protect portfolios against inflation, cash, inflation-indexed bonds, equities, real estate, and commodities are the usual candidates. We examine each, plus other assets and, importantly, various kinds of liabilities, to examine their historical and prospective responses to expected and unexpected inflation. Our article is integrative, bringing together ideas and data from many different sources in one place. Key Findings ▪ The “tightest” hedge against inflation is provided by TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities), but they have very low—currently negative—real yields. ▪ Equity indexes, sometimes thought to be an inflation hedge, only “work” over a very long time horizon, and are actually a negative hedge in shorter time frames, falling when inflation rates rise. ▪ The best hedge against inflation—admittedly imperfect—is a diversified portfolio of real assets including TIPS, real estate, commodities used sparingly, and certain equities selected for their ability to pass cost increases through to consumers. International equities and debt may also be a hedge against domestic inflation due to the currency effect.

From the angle of research and development (R&D) input, this paper analyzes how bond financing affects corporate total factor productivity (TFP). Based on the 2007–2019 data on listed enterprises, the influence and action mechanism of bond financing on corporate TFP were empirically examined. The results show that bond financing significantly boosts corporate TFP. The mechanism analysis reveals that bond financing promotes TFP by stimulating corporate R&D input. The research sheds new light on the relationship between finance and TFP from the perspective of bond financing and provides a reference for policymakers to boost corporate TFP by promoting bond financing.

This paper analyzes the effects of credit frictions in a trade model where heterogeneous firms select both into exporting and into two types of external finance. In our framework, small producers face stronger credit frictions, pay a higher borrowing rate and rely on bank finance, whereas large firms have access to cheaper bond finance. We show that an increase in credit frictions induces firms to select into bank finance, which attenuates the negative implications on product variety and welfare. In the open economy, the presence of effective financial intermediation increases the welfare gains from trade. In a counterfactual analysis, we exploit that our framework nests a model with credit frictions and one type of finance as a special case, and we show that endogenous selection into external finance is an important channel of adjustment.

In this paper, we combine modern portfolio theory and option pricing theory so that a trader who takes a position in a European option contract and the underlying assets can construct an optimal portfolio such that at the moment of the contract’s maturity the contract is perfectly hedged. We derive both the optimal holdings in the underlying assets for the trader’s optimal mean-variance portfolio and the amount of unhedged risk prior to maturity. Solutions assuming the cases where the price dynamics in the underlying assets follows discrete binomial price dynamics, continuous diffusions, stochastic volatility, volatility-of-volatility, and Merton-jump diffusion are derived.