Recent empirical work indicates that, in a variety of financial markets, both conditional expectations and conditional variances of returns are time- varying. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether these joint fluctuations of conditional first and second moments are consistent with...

We examine empirically how the maturity structure of government debt affects bond yields and excess returns. Our analysis is based on a theoretical model of preferred habitat in which clienteles with strong preferences for specific maturities trade with arbitrageurs. Consistent with the model,...

We test a Wall Street investment strategy known as pairs trading' with daily data over the period 1962 through 1997. Stocks are matched into pairs according to minimum distance in historical normalized price space. We test the profitability of several trading rules with six-month trading periods...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the long-run dependence in financial market volatility is best characterized by a slowly mean-reverting fractionally integrated process. At the same time, much shorter-lived volatility dependencies are typically observed with high-frequency intradaily...

The paper characterizes predictable components in excess rates of returns on major equity and foreign exchange markets using lagged excess returns, dividend yields, and forward premiums as instruments. Vector autoregressive techniques demonstrate one-step-ahead predictability and provide implied...

We distinguish between ”good” and ”bad” carry trades constructed from G-10 currencies. The good trades exhibit higher Sharpe ratios and sometimes positive return skewness, in contrast to the bad trades that have both substantially lower Sharpe ratios and highly negative return skewness....