A structural framework for modelling contingent capital

This paper develops a structural model of contingent capital. In contrast to existing approaches we explicitly link the firm’s total payout to its cost of debt, leading to a total payout that is linear in—as opposed to proportional to—asset value. In the special case that asset value evolves as affine geometric Brownian motion we derive closed-form expressions for limiting (i.e. perpetual) bond values. The proposed model is flexible, so that it can be used to gauge the relative merits of different variations of contingent capital, and parsimonious, so that it is relatively easy to implement in practice. An empirical example using data from the Canadian banking sector is provided that illustrates how the model can generate insights into problems that are of interest to both regulators and issuers of contingent capital (e.g. what range of conversion prices would be consistent with regulatory guidelines, and how expensive is contingent debt over this range).     

The term structures of equity and interest rates

This paper proposes a dynamic risk-based model capable of jointly explaining the term structure of interest rates, returns on the aggregate market, and the risk and return characteristics of value and growth stocks. Both the term structure of interest rates and returns on value and growth stocks convey information about how the representative investor values cash flows of different maturities. We model how the representative investor perceives risks of these cash flows by specifying a parsimonious stochastic discount factor for the economy. Shocks to dividend growth, the real interest rate, and expected inflation are priced, but shocks to the price of risk are not. Given reasonable assumptions for dividends and inflation, we show that the model can simultaneously account for the behavior of aggregate stock returns, an upward-sloping yield curve, the failure of the expectations hypothesis, and the poor performance of the capital asset pricing model.     

Monetary Policy Expectations at the Zero Lower Bound

We show that conventional dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) estimated on recent U.S. data severely violate the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates and deliver poor forecasts of future short rates. In contrast, shadow‐rate DTSMs account for the ZLB by construction, capture the resulting distributional asymmetry of future short rates, and achieve good forecast performance. These models provide more accurate estimates of the most likely path for future monetary policy—including the timing of policy liftoff from the ZLB and the pace of subsequent policy tightening. We also demonstrate the benefits of including macroeconomic factors in a shadow‐rate DTSM when yields are constrained near the ZLB.