[...]This article investigates whether changes in the termpremium tend to distort the term spread’s recession signals.3We begin by decomposing the term spread into an expectationscomponent and a term premium component, based on the Kimand Wright (2005) term premium estimates. Next, we...

[...]This article examines the U.S. Treasury’s decision tointroduce a new financial instrument—Treasury bills—in1929. We show that Treasury officials were willing to committhe resources required to introduce the new security in orderto mitigate several flaws in the structure of Treasury...

[...]This article examines why, during the 1970s, Treasuryofficials changed the framework within which they made their debt management decisions. We show that the Treasuryfinanced an unusually rapid expansion of the deficit in 1975with a flurry of tactical offerings. The offerings disrupted...

[...]This article examines the origins and early development ofthe Federal Reserve’s book-entry system—the system mostclosely associated with the elimination of definitive, orcertificated, Treasury securities. We suggest that the Fed’ssystem was the product of three important factors: the...

[...]This article examines the introduction of regular auctionofferings of Treasury notes and bonds in the early 1970s. We donot take issue with the conventional wisdom that auctions aremore efficient and less costly than fixed-price offerings. Rather,we seek to identify why the Treasury twice...

[...]This article describes the U.S. experience with inflationindexeddebt, including the evolution of activity in the TIISmarket since its inception and the valuation of those securitiesrelative to nominal Treasury issues. We show that despite thepotential appeal of TIIS, their yields have been...

[...]Our first suggestion is to reduce the fragmentation oftrading in STRIPS by assigning the same CUSIP number to allSTRIPS maturing on a common date—thus making thoseSTRIPS fungible with each other. In addition to enhancing theliquidity of the STRIPS market, this action would ensure...

In this paper, we use methods from social network analysis to assess the relative importance of financial centers around the world. Using data from virtually the entire universe of global equity activity, we present two sets of complete rankings for up to forty-five separate locations for the...