Most central banks effect changes to their target or policy rate in discrete increments (e.g., multiples of 0.25%) following public announcements on scheduled dates. Still, for most applications, researchers rely on the assumption that the policy rate changes linearly with economic conditions...

We examine the quantitative effect of search frictions in product markets on asset price volatility. We combine several features from Shi (1997) and Lagos and Wright (2002) in a model without money. Households prefer special goods and general goods. Special goods can be obtained only via a...

We investigate the macroeconomic determinants of corporate spreads using a no-arbitrage technique. Structural shocks are identified by a New-Keynesian model. Treasury bonds are priced in an affine model with time-varying risk premia. Corporate bonds are priced in a reduced-form credit risk model...

The observed predictability of excess returns in equity and foreign exchange markets has largely been attributed to the presence of time-varying risk premiums in these markets. For example, excess equity returns were found to be explained by various financial and economic variables. Similarly,...

Loan-level data on the uncollateralized overnight loan market is generated using payment data from Canada's Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) and a modified version of the methodology proposed in Furfine (1999). There were on average just under 100 loans extended in this market each day from...

This paper examines the contributions of population aging, mortgage innovation and historically low interest rates to the sharp rise in U.S. house prices and mortgage debt between 1994 and 2005. I construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium housing model and find that these three...

Plain vanilla options have a single underlying asset and a single condition on the payoff at the expiration date. For this class of options, a well-known result of Duffie, Pan and Singleton (2000) shows how to invert the characteristic function to obtain a closed-form formula for their prices....

We develop a discrete-time affine stochastic volatility model with time-varying conditional skewness (SVS). Importantly, we disentangle the dynamics of conditional volatility and conditional skewness in a coherent way. Our approach allows current asset returns to be asymmetric conditional on...

Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) show that (i) lagged forward rates improve the predictability of annual bond returns, adding to current forward rates, and that (ii) a Markovian model for monthly forward rates cannot generate the pattern of predictability in annual returns. These results stand as a...

The end result of major sporting events has been shown to affect next-day stock returns through shifts in investor mood. By studying the soccer matches that led to the elimination of France and Italy from the 2010 FIFA World Cup, we show that mood-related pricing effects can materialize as...