In the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the debt crisis in the euro area yields on German federal bonds have been exceptionally low. This analysis tries to calculate the profits that the federal government makes due to the low yields. The interest payments that are due to emissions of...

This paper studies how inflation as a macroeconomic indicator affects nominal bond prices. I consider an economy with a representative agent with Epstein-Zin preferences. Regime switching affects the state-space capturing inêation and consumption growth. Thus, the agent is concerned about the...

Using a Dynamic Semiparametric Factor Model (DSFM) we investigate the term structure of interest rates. The proposed methodology is applied to monthly interest rates for four southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain from the introduction of the Euro to the recent European...

The efficient rate of return of a zero-coupon bond with maturity t is determined by our expectations about the mean (+), variance (-) and skewness (+) of the growth of aggregate consumption between 0 and t. The shape of the yield curve is thus determined by how these moments vary with t. We...

Pricing and hedging of long-term interest rate sensitive products require to extrapolate the term structure beyond observable maturities. For the resulting limiting term structure we show two results by postulating no arbitrage in a bond market with infinitely increasing maturities: long...

This paper extends the benchmark Macro-Finance model by introducing, next to the standard macroeconomic factors, additional liquidity-related and return forecasting factors. Liquidity factors are obtained from a decomposition of the TED spread while the return-forecasting (risk premium) factor...

We separate changes of the federal funds rate into two components; one reflects the Fed's superior forecasts about the state of the economy and the other component reflects the Fed's reaction to the public's forecast about the state of the economy. Romer and Romer (2000) found that the Fed...

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...