Despite the importance of insurance in enabling individual and collective social, economic, and financial activities, discussions about the macro-economic role and risks of insurance markets are surprisingly limited. The core motivation for publishing this book is to bring together academics,...

Variable rate savings accounts have two main features. The client rate is variable and deposits can be invested and withdrawn at any time. However, customer behaviour is not fully rational and actions are often performed with a delay. This paper focusses on measuring the interest rate risk of...

This paper attempts to provide an economic interpretation of the factors that drive the movements of interest rates of bonds of different maturities in a continuous-time no-arbitrage term structure model for Chile. The dynamics of yields in the model are explained by two latent factors, namely...

We analyze how public finances, through sovereign interest rates, impact corporate borrowing costs in the Euro Area. Theoretically, an increase in sovereign rates can have an impact on banks interest rates through three main channels: i) an increase in the risk free rate (price channel) ii) a...

This paper studies the interrelations among yield curve factors, market expectations and monetary policy rates using interbank interest rates across Euro- and non-Euro countries. The term structure of interest rates can be summarized by the level and slope factor, whereas curvature is not a...

This paper addresses the issue of forecasting the term structure. We provide a unified state-space modelling framework that encompasses different existing discrete-time yield curve models. Within such framework we analyze the impact of two modelling choices, namely the imposition of no-arbitrage...

Interest rates are very persistent. Modelling the persistent component of interest rates has important consequences for forecasting. Consider Affine Term Structure Models (ATSM): given the dynamics of the short term rate, a stationary VAR for the factors is used to project the entire term...

We develop a parsimonious arbitrage-free yield net model for consistent bond pricing across maturities and issuers. Containing a core curve and multiple periphery curves, the yield net is spanned by three layers of factors: base factors spanning all curves, common spread factors spanning all...

In this paper, we extract common factors from a cross-section of U.S. macro-variables and Treasury zero-coupon yields. We find that two macroeconomic factors have an important predictive content for government bond yields and excess returns. These factors are not spanned by the cross-section of...

We assess the effect of the QE2 program on the TIPS liquidity premium using a latent factor approach and a counterfactual exercise. In the context of a state-space model for nominal and TIPS yields, we identify the TIPS liquidity premium as the common component in TIPS yields that is unspanned...