How do interest rates react to news? This paper presents a new methodology, based on a simple dynamic term structure model, which provides for an integrated analysis of the effects of monetary policy actions and macroeconomic news on the term structure of interest rates. I find several new...

Previous research has emphasized the portfolio balance effects of Federal Reserve bond purchases, in which a reduced bond supply lowers term premia. In contrast, we find that such purchases have important signaling effects that lower expected future short term interest rates. Our evidence comes...

Affine dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) are the standard finance representation of the yield curve. However, the literature on DTSMs has ignored the coefficient bias that plagues estimated autoregressive models of persistent time series. We introduce new simulation-based methods for...

How do monetary policy expectations and term premia respond to news? This paper provides new answers to this question by means of a dynamic term structure model (DTSM) in which risk prices are restricted. This leads to more precise and more reliable estimates of expectations and term premium...

Obtaining monetary policy expectations from the yield curve is difficult near the zero lower bound (ZLB). Standard dynamic term structure models, which ignore the ZLB, can be misleading. Shadow-rate models are better suited for this purpose, because they account for the distributional asymmetry...

This paper provides the first application of the compensating differential paradigm to the evaluation of the extent and sources of evolution in quality-of-life among U.S. states. In addition to providing estimates of quality-of-life rankings for U.S. states over the 1981-1990 period, we use...

Although it is generally recognized that the equilibrium real interest rate (ERR) varies over time, most recent work on policy analysis has been carried out under the assumption that this rate is constant. We show how this assumption can affect inferences about the conduct of policy in two...

This paper provides a counterexample to the simplest version of the redistribution models considered by Judd (1985) in which the government chooses an optimal distortionary tax on capitalists to finance a lump-sum payment to workers. I show that the steady-state optimal tax on capital income is...

This paper examines the incidence and welfare costs of inflation in the presence of financial market frictions and home production. The results suggest that financing constraints on firms' working capital expenditures significantly increase the welfare costs relative to the standard...

Covariance matrix forecasts of financial asset returns are an important component of current practice in financial risk management. A wide variety of models, ranging from matrices of simple summary measures to covariance matrices implied from option prices, are available for generating such...