In emerging market economies, currency appreciation goes hand in hand with compressed sovereign bond spreads, even for local currency sovereign bonds. This yield compression comes from a reduction in the credit risk premium. Crucially, the relevant exchange rate involved in yield compression is...

We quantify the importance of non-monetary news in central bank communication. Using evidence from four major central banks and a comprehensive classification of events, we decompose news conveyed by central banks into news about monetary policy, economic growth, and separately, shocks to risk...

We study the feedback from the risk of outstanding mortgage-backed securities (MBS) on the level and volatility of interest rates. We incorporate the supply shocks resulting from changes in MBS duration into a parsimonious equilibrium dynamic term structure model and derive three predictions...

We examine the informational content of TIPS yields from the viewpoint of a general 3-factor no-arbitrage term structure model of inflation and interest rates. Our empirical results indicate that TIPS yields contained a "liquidity premium" that was until recently quite large (~1%). Key features...

This paper reexamines the issue of unspanned stochastic volatility (USV) in bond markets and the puzzle of poor relative pricing between bonds and bond options. I make a distinction between the "weak USV" and the "strong USV" scenarios, and analyze the evidence for each of them. I argue that the...

This paper analyses the peculiar nature of credit risk in project finance by means of a comparative econometric analysis of ex ante credit spreads for a large cross section of international loans and bonds between 1993 and 2001 in both industrialised and emerging countries. Our main contribution...