Santa-Clara and Valkanov (2003) document that excess returns on the stock market are puzzlingly higher under Democratic presidential administrations. We examine whether differences in economic fundamentals can account for this presidential puzzle. We find that the role for fundamentals crucially...

Recent research, including Santa-Clara and Valkanov (2003), has concluded that there is a stable, robust and significant relationship between Democratic presidential administrations and robust stock returns. These conclusions are largely based on OLS estimates of the difference in returns across...

Despite powerful advances in yield curve modeling in the last twenty years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the key practical problem of forecasting the yield curve. In this paper we do so. We use neither the no-arbitrage approach, which focuses on accurately fitting the cross...

The popular Nelson-Siegel (1987) yield curve is routinely fit to cross sections of intra-country bond yields, and Diebold and Li (2006) have recently proposed a dynamized version. In this paper we extend Diebold-Li to a global context, modeling a potentially large set of country yield curves in...

In this paper we use a regime-switching process to model the unobserved volatility of the underlying asset and derive a closed-form, risk-neutral option pricing formula. Specifically, our model implies the state price density (SPD) is a time-varying mixture of normals which can provide for...

My dissertation consists of three essays, which cover topics in theoretical and empirical finance. In the first essay titled "the skewness premium and the asymmetric volatility puzzle," we use a general equilibrium model to study the source and reward of asymmetric volatility or skewness of...

There is much confusion in the economics literature on wage determination and the employment–inflation trade-off. Few model builders pay as much careful attention to the definition and meaning of long-run concepts as did Albert Ando. Expanding on years of painstaking work by Ando, the...

This paper estimates an arbitrage-free term structure model with both observable yield factors and Treasury and Agency MBS supply factors, and uses it to evaluate the term premium effects of the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase programs. Our estimates show that the first and the...

Following Diebold and Li (2006), we use the Nelson-Siegel (NS, 1987) yield curve factors. However the NS yield curve factors are not supervised for a specifi?c forecast target in the sense that the same factors are used for forecasting different variables, e.g., output growth or infl?ation. We...

Despite powerful advances in yield curve modeling in the last twenty years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the key practical problem of forecasting the yield curve. In this paper we do so. We use neither the no-arbitrage approach, which focuses on accurately fitting the cross...