Occasional structural breaks and long memory with an application to the S&P 500 absolute stock returns

This paper shows that occasional breaks generate slowly decaying autocorrelations and other properties of I(d) processes, where d can be a fraction. Some theory and simulation results show that it is not easy to distinguish between the long memory property from the occasional-break process and the one from the I(d) process. We compare two time series models, an occasional-break model and an I(d) model to analyze S&P 500 absolute stock returns. An occasional-break model performs marginally better than an I(d) model in terms of in-sample fitting. In general, we found that an occasional-break model provides less competitive forecasts, but not significantly. However, the empirical results suggest a possibility such that, at least, part of the long memory may be caused by the presence of neglected breaks in the series. We show that the forecasts by an occasional break model incorporate incremental information regrading future volatility beyond that found in I(d) model. The findings enable improvements of volatility prediction by combining I(d) model and occasional-break model.     

Investor strategies in the green bond market: The influence of liquidity risks,economic factors and clientele effects

The green bond market has dramatically expanded especially in Europe but severe liquidity issues may undermine its rapid development. If few studies have assessed the implied liquidity risks for investors in terms of liquidity premium, none of them have specifically analysed its behavior across bond maturities. To fill this gap, this paper studies the term structure of the liquidity premium of the green bond market.We find that the sizes of short-term and long-term premia are close to those estimated on the German government bond market. We show that those premia are affected by economic factors and by spillover effects between them, which contribute to the U-Shape of the liquidity premium. Finally, we detect a liquidity clientele effect on the ask side impacting the liquidity premium, which implies a maturity segmentation i.e., high-risk (resp. low-risk) investors buy short-term (resp. long-term) green bonds and hold them until maturity.Taken together, our results deliver valuable insights on investors' strategies in the green bond market. Quite importantly, green bond investors prefer to opt for buy and hold strategies because they are compensated for higher liquidity risks along the entire maturity spectrum.     

No-arbitrage Near-Cointegrated VAR(p) term structure models,term premia and GDP growth

The recent macro-finance literature does not agree either about the empirical properties of the expectation part and of the term premium on long-term bonds or about the importance or even the direction of the relationship between the term premium and future economic activity. This paper proposes a two-step approach to handle both problems. First, in a VAR setting, we extract a reliable measure of the term premium by means of averaging estimator techniques aiming at optimally solving prediction problems when highly persistent processes are present and, thus, providing a so called Near-Cointegrated VAR(p) approach. Second, we analyze the dynamic response of GDP to shocks to the term premium by using the New Information Response Function concept. As far as the first problem is concerned, we find that the NCVAR-based term premium measure is rather stable and counter-cyclical, as suggested by interest rates survey-based estimation of yield curve models and by its risk compensation role. Regarding the second problem, we find that an increase in the long-term spread caused by the term premium induces two effects on future economic activity: the impact is negative for short horizons (less than 1 year), whereas it is positive for longer ones.     

Banks,maturity transformation,and monetary policy

Banks engage in maturity transformation and the term premium compensates them for bearing the associated interest rate risk. Consistent with this view, I show that banks’ net interest margins and term premia have comoved in the United States over the last decades. On monetary policy announcement days, bank equity falls more sharply than nonbank equity following an increase in expected future short-term rates, but also responds more positively if term premia increase. These effects are reflected in bank cash-flows and amplified for banks with a larger maturity mismatch. The results reveal that banks are not immune to interest rate risk.     

Australian and US interest rate swap markets: comparison and linkages

We investigate and compare the determinants of US and Australian interest rate swap spreads and the linkages between these markets. The slope of the risk‐free term structure is the most significant determinant and its importance is greater for longer terms to maturity. Interest rate levels and, in Australia, the default premium also have some impact. The influences of interest rate volatility, the liquidity premium and (in the USA) the default premium are small or negligible. We hypothesise, and our evidence confirms, that the US swap market significantly affects the Australian swap market but not vice‐versa.     

Time-varying risk premium yield spread effect in term structure and global financial crisis: Evidence from Europe

The global financial crisis had a significant effect on the interest rates and the term structure of interest rates around the globe. In this paper we apply the GARCH-in-mean (GARCH-M) to study the effect of the global financial crisis on the term structure volatility, persistence of volatility, risk premium, and effects of the yield spread in five European markets; Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (PIIGS). To the best of our knowledge this is the first such study in the field, and thus represents the main contribution of the paper to the literature. We investigate both the longer end and the shorter end of the term structure. We study two versions of the longer end based on the 10-year bond (long-term rate) and the two short-term rates, (three- and six-month rates). The shorter end of the term structure is based on the two short-term rates. Results indicate a substantial change in the term structure volatility, persistence of volatility, risk premium, and the effects of the yield spread due to the financial crisis. These results are found for both the longer end and the shorter end versions of the term structure.     

Pricing forward contracts in power markets by the certainty equivalence principle: Explaining the sign of the market risk premium

In this paper we provide a framework that explains how the market risk premium, defined as the difference between forward prices and spot forecasts, depends on the risk preferences of market players and the interaction between buyers and sellers. In commodities markets this premium is an important indicator of the behavior of buyers and sellers and their views on the market spanning between short-term and long-term horizons. We show that under certain assumptions it is possible to derive explicit solutions that link levels of risk aversion and market power with market prices of risk and the market risk premium. We apply our model to the German electricity market and show that the market risk premium exhibits a term structure which can be explained by the combination of two factors. Firstly, the levels of risk aversion of buyers and sellers, and secondly, how the market power of producers, relative to that of buyers, affects forward prices with different delivery periods.     

Trade-off Model of Debt Maturity Structure

In this paper, we suggest the trade-off model to explain the choice of debt maturity. This model is based on balancing between risk and reward of using shorter-term loans. Shorter-term loans have cost advantage over, but incur higher refinancing and interest rate risk than longer-term loans. Using the Compustat data, we show that the principal components of financial attributes are financial flexibility and financial strength. Therefore, only firms with greater financial flexibility and financial strength can use proportionately more short-term loans. We also document that financially strong firms take advantage of lower interest rates of short-term debt. They use proportionately more short-term loans when the term premium is high. The results of our study also provide evidence supporting the agency cost hypothesis, which is strongly supported by current literature.     

Financialization and speculators risk premia in commodity futures markets

J.M. Keynes coined the term normal backwardation, a situation where a futures price for a particular expiry month is less than the expected spot price for that month. He argued hedgers pay speculators a risk premium, giving rise to normal backwardation. We study the behavior of commodity futures before and since financialization of the markets, which started about 20 years ago. We find the poor returns to managed futures in recent years are likely due to the impact of financialization and the associated outside money suppressing the futures risk premium.     

The information content of the term structure of risk-neutral skewness

We seek to reconcile the debate about the price effect of risk-neutral skewness (RNS) on stocks. We document positive predictability from short-term skewness, consistent with informed-trading demand, and negative predictability from long-term skewness, consistent with skewness preference. A term spread on RNS captures different information from long- and short-term contracts, resulting in stronger predictability. The quintile portfolio with the lowest spread outperforms that with highest spread by 14.64% annually. The term structure of RNS predicts earnings surprises and price crashes. We extract the slope factor from RNS term structure, estimate its risk premium, and explore its relation with several macroeconomic variables.     

Identifying volatility risk premia from fixed income Asian options

Fixed income options are frequently adopted by companies to hedge interest rate risk. Their payoff dependence on the cumulative short-term rate makes them particularly informative about interest rate volatility risk. Based on a joint dataset of bonds and Asian interest rate options, we study the interrelations between bond and volatility risk premia in a major emerging fixed income market. We propose a dynamic term structure model that generates an incomplete market compatible with a preliminary empirical analysis of the dataset. Approximation formulas for at-the-money Asian option prices avoid the use of computationally intensive Fourier transform methods, allowing for an efficient implementation of the model. The model generates a bond risk premium strongly correlated with a widely accepted emerging market benchmark index (EMBI-Global), and a negative volatility risk premium, consistent with the use of Asian options as insurance in this market.     

Liquidity costs,idiosyncratic volatility and expected stock returns

This paper considers liquidity as an explanation for the positive association between expected idiosyncratic volatility (IV) and expected stock returns. Liquidity costs may affect the stock returns, through bid-ask bounce and other microstructure-induced noise, which will affect the estimation of IV. We use a novel method (developed by Weaver, 1991) to eliminate microstructure influences from stock closing price-based returns and then estimate IV. We show that there is a premium for IV in value-weighted portfolios, but this premium is less strong after correcting returns for microstructure bias. We further show that this premium is driven by liquidity in the prior month after correcting returns for microstructure noise. The pricing results from equally-weighted portfolios indicate that IV does not predict returns either before or after controlling for liquidity costs. These findings are robust after controlling for common risk factors as well as analysing double-sorted portfolios based on IV and liquidity.     

Examining the bond premium puzzle with a DSGE model

The basic inability of standard theoretical models to generate a sufficiently large and variable nominal bond risk premium has been termed the “bond premium puzzle.” We show that the term premium on long-term bonds in the canonical dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in macroeconomics is far too small and stable relative to the data. We find that introducing long-memory habits in consumption as well as labor market frictions can help fit the term premium, but only by seriously distorting the DSGE model's ability to fit other macroeconomic variables, such as the real wage; therefore, the bond premium puzzle remains.     

The monetary model in the presence of I(2) components: long-run relationships, short-run dynamics and forecasting of the Greek drachma

This paper re-examines the long-run properties of the monetary exchange rate model using data for the drachma–dollar and drachma–mark exchange rates under the hypothesis that the system contains variables that are I(2). Using the recent I(2) test by Paruolo (On the determination of integration indices in I(2) systems. J. Economet. 72 (1996) 313–356) to examine the presence of I(2) and I(1) components in a multivariate context we find that the system contains two I(2) variables in both cases and this finding is reconfirmed by the estimated roots of the companion matrix (Do purchasing power parity and uncovered interest rate parity hold in the long-run? An example of likelihood inference in a multivariate time-series model. Juselius, J. Economet. 69 (1995) 211–240). The I(2) component led to the transformation of the estimated model by imposing long-run but not short-run proportionality between domestic and foreign money. Two statistically significant cointegrating vectors were found and, by imposing linear restrictions on each vector as suggested by Johansen and Juselius (Identification of the long-run and the short-run structure: an applicaion to the ISLM model. J. Economet. 63 (1994) 7–36) and Johansen (Identifying restrictions of linear equations with applications to simultaneous equations and cointegration. J. Economet. 69 (1995b) 111–132), the order and rank conditions for identification are satisfied, but the test for overidentifying restrictions was not significant only for the case of the drachma/mark rate. The main findings suggest that we reject the forward-looking version of the monetary model for the drachma/dollar case but not when the drachma/mark rate is used, a result that is attributed to the monetary and exchange rate policy followed by the Greek authorities since Greece's joining of the European Union. Furthermore, we test for parameter stability using the tests developed by Hansen and Johansen (Recursive estimation in cointegrated VAR-models. Working paper (1993) University of Copenhagen) and it is shown that the dimension of the cointegration rank is sample independent while the estimated coefficients do not exhibit instabilities in recursive estimations. Finally, it is shown that the monetary model outperforms the random walk model in an out-of-sample forecasting contest.     

An introduction to security returns

The equity premium - the difference between the return achievable from investment in the equity market (R_M ) and the risk-free rate of return (R_F )- plays an important part in corporate finance. The expression equity premium (sometimes referred to as the equity risk premium) is used to denote the ex ante expectation of investors. The term excess return refers to the ex post achievement of stock returns over and above the risk-free return. If we compare US and UK returns, we find that total returns, real returns and the value of (R_M - R_F ) are all marginally higher for the UK. Summarized evidence appears in Table 1 and Table 6. Such greater returns may be due to an increased risk premium related to increasing unexpected inflation. Particularly important in estimating the equity risk premium is whether excess returns are measured using a geometric or an arithmetic mean return. To a significant extent, this question revolves around mean reversion in stock returns. Evidence of mean reversion is substantial, although it cannot be proved unequivocally. Given the weight of evidence of mean reversion, there may be a strong case for the use of a geometric mean with an equity premium of between 3% and 5% - or even less.     

Premium setting and bank behavior in a voluntary deposit insurance scheme

This study analyzes the effect of premium rates on banks’ incentives to join a deposit insurance scheme and their incentives to invest in risky projects under a voluntary deposit insurance scheme. We find that in order to maximize social welfare, the insurance agency must either set the premium rate to be low so as to attract all banks to join the insurance scheme, or not to have the deposit insurance at all. However, the low premium rate in the voluntary scheme does not balance the budget of the deposit insurance. We also show that in the compulsory deposit insurance scheme, however, it is possible to impose an optimal premium rate that can balance the insurance agency’s budget and achieve the highest social welfare. The results also present the dominance of the compulsory scheme over the voluntary scheme in terms of maximizing social welfare and balancing the budget.

Is integration I(d) applicable to observed economics and finance time series?

The method of cointegration in regression analysis is based on an assumption of stationary increments. Stationary increments with fixed time lag are called ‘integration I(d)’. A class of regression models where cointegration works was identified by Granger and yields the ergodic behavior required for equilibrium expectations in standard economics. Detrended finance market returns are martingales, and martingales do not satisfy regression equations. We ask if there exist detrended processes beyond standard regression models that satisfy integration I(d). We show that stationary increment martingales are confined to the Wiener process, and observe that martingales describing finance data admit neither the integration I(d) nor the ergodicity required for long time equilibrium relationships. In particular, the martingales derived from finance data do not admit the time (or ‘space’) translational invariance required for increment stationarity. Our analysis explains the lack of equilibrium observed earlier between FX rates and relative price levels.     

Is the Term Premium a Risk Premium?

This paper explores whether excess holding period returns on long vis-a-vis short-term securities behave in a manner that is consistent with (1) market efficiency, (2) the time-varying-term-premium variant of the expectations hypothesis, and (3) theories of the term premium that view it as a reward for risk bearing. Both traditional and modern theories of the term premium imply that it should evolve fairly slowly over time as attitudes toward risk and/or perceived covariances with wealth or consumption change. This implies that this period's term premium should have some predictive ability for next period's. However, we find that this quarter's ex-post term premium has zero predictive ability. For monthly rates and returns, the evidence is less clear cut, but again the implied term premia do not behave in a manner consistent with existing theories.     

A Markov switching unobserved component analysis of the CDX index term premium

Using a Markov switching unobserved component model we decompose the term premium of the North American CDX index into a permanent and a stationary component. We establish that the inversion of the CDX term premium is induced by sudden changes in the unobserved stationary component, which represents the evolution of the fundamentals underpinning the probability of default in the economy. We find evidence that the monetary policy response from the Fed during the crisis period was effective in reducing the volatility of the term premium. We also show that equity returns make a substantial contribution to the term premium over the entire sample period.