Pricing effects in Fannie Mae agency bonds

As a government-sponsored enterprise, Fannie Mae enjoys certain advantages over other firms. The extent of these advantages, while widely discussed, have not yet been fully quantified. This paper empirically examines the returns to Fannie Mae general obligation bonds under the assumptions of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory. The model provides an explicit method for estimating the risk premium on Fannie Mae bonds. The results indicate that liquidity and tax effects are important in explaining the returns to Fannie Mae bonds. The results also indicate that the market does not incorporate changes in the riskiness of the mortgage market into the returns on Fannie Mae bonds. The results provide support for the contention that Fannie Mae, as a government sponsored enterprise, enjoys a significant advantage over other firms in the capital market.     

Statement no.134 a proposal for privatization of the Federal Home Loan Bank system

Statement no.134 a proposal for privatization of the Federal Home Loan Bank systemMay 6, 1996     

THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTIMATING RISK PREMIA IN ASSET PRICING MODELS

The authors show that estimates of risk premia on the market based on capital asset pricing models or arbitrage pricing theories can only be estimates of the ex post or sample risk premium on the market and cannot be interpreted as better estimates of the ex ante premium than those provided by sample averages of data. The ex ante premium drops out of the generating function for the returns used in the second-pass regressions. Although previous estimates of nonmarket premia have failed to take appropriate account of the population mean, that mean can in fact be estimated and appropriate adjustments made. Various approaches to estimating the ex ante risk premium and the population mean are discussed.     

Bondholder losses in leveraged buyouts

Announcements of successful leveraged buyouts (LBOs) duringJanuary 1985 to April 1989 caused a significantly negative returnon outstanding publicly traded nonconvertible bonds. Yet theaverage risk-adjusted debt holder losses are less than 7 percentof the average risk-adjusted equity bolder gains. Bond lossesare related to the pre-LBO rating, but only weakly to equityholder gains. We demonstrate that trader-quoted data from amajor investment bank offers conclusions about the effects ofLBOs on debt holders different from those drawn from commonlyused matrix and exchange-based data (such as Standard & Poor-'sBond Guide data). This has important implications for eventstudies involving debt instruments.     

Measuring Potential GSE Funding Advantages

As the size of government sponsored enterprises (GSE) has grown, attention has focused on the relationship between the federal government and the GSEs, with particular attention focused on estimating the impact of this relationship on GSE debt costs. Quantifying the GSEs cost advantage is a controversial exercise with several competing methodologies providing divergent values. Thus, this paper reviews the methods that have been utilized in previous studies and recommends an alternative approach that overcomes many of the criticisms of previous work. By using offering yields on GSE debt, we find that the three housing GSEs enjoyed an average advantage of between 25 and 29 basis points over AA banking sector bonds, between 43 and 47 basis points over A rated bonds, and between 76 and 80 basis points over BBB rated banking issues. We find that our results are robust to both the basic approach taken as well as to model specification.     

Underpricing in the Corporate Bond Market

This article examines underpricing of initial public offerings(IPOs) and seasoned offerings in the corporate bond market.We investigate whether underpricing represents a solution toan information problem or a liquidity problem. We find thatunderpricing occurs with both IPOs and seasoned offerings andis highest among riskier, unknown firms. Our evidence suggeststhat information problems drive underpricing, with support forboth the bookbuilding view of underpricing and the asymmetricinformation theory. We do not find evidence in favor of theRock model of underpricing or any evidence that illiquiditycauses underpricing.     

Risk and the Performance of Real Estate Investment Trusts: A Multiple Index Approach

This paper analyzes the returns of a sample of Real Estate Investment Trusts and examines their risk-adjusted performance using both single index (i.e., CAPM) and multiple index (i.e., APT) models. It is shown that while the performance rankings of the investment trusts are not very sensitive to the risk-adjustment model, the actual performance measures do sometimes differ substantially. Unfortunately, because of the high volatility of these real estate investments, the differences in investment performance across trusts generally are not statistically significant.