Are Fundamentals Priced in the Bond Market?*

To date, the discussion of the Lev and Thiagarajan 1993 fundamentals in the prior literature has been exclusively in the context of the stock market. Our study is the first to examine the value‐relevance of these fundamentals for default risk. By focusing on the market for new bond issues, we examine the value‐relevance of the fundamental score using expected rather than realized returns. Also, by focusing on the bond market we provide a different perspective than that brought by prior studies relying solely on stock prices. We find the fundamentals to be priced in the market for new bond issues as indicators of expected future earnings and to be value‐relevant in enabling the market to discern differences in bond credit quality over and above the published bond ratings.     

Likelihood-based specification analysis of continuous-time models of the short-term interest rate

An extensive collection of continuous-time models of the short-term interest rate is evaluated over data sets that have appeared previously in the literature. The analysis, which uses the simulated maximum likelihood procedure proposed by Durham and Gallant (2002), provides new insights regarding several previously unresolved questions. For single factor models, I find that the volatility, not the drift, is the critical component in model specification. Allowing for additional flexibility beyond a constant term in the drift provides negligible benefit. While constant drift would appear to imply that the short rate is nonstationary, in fact, stationarity is volatility-induced. The simple constant elasticity of volatility model fits weekly observations of the three-month Treasury bill rate remarkably well but is easily rejected when compared with more flexible volatility specifications over daily data. The methodology of Durham and Gallant can also be used to estimate stochastic volatility models. While adding the latent volatility component provides a large improvement in the likelihood for the physical process, it does little to improve bond-pricing performance.     

2005年国际金融市场回顾与2006年展望

2005年的国际金融市场走势跌宕起伏,股票市场表现不一,债券市场基本上是区间波动走势,外汇市场美元一枝独秀,石油价格冲高回落而黄金的表现也引人注目。决定市场走势的因素是美国经济表现稳健,欧、日经济相形见绌,同时美国利率持续上升。2006年受房地产市场降温的影响,美国经济可能温和放缓,利率很快见顶,将对金融市场产生重大影响,总体而言风险加大。     

企业债券融资的比较优势与实证分析

为稳步推进资本市场改革开放和稳定发展，我国明确了大力发展企业债券市场的目的与总体方案，但市场状况仍不尽如人意。本文在分析西方企业融资理论的基础上，归纳了企业债券融资的相对优势，并结合中国融资市场的现状进行了实证研究，实证结果表明，中国上市公司企业债券融资的成本优势并不显著，但融资“信号”传递作用明显。     

中国债券市场发展评析

经过多年的艰辛努力，2002年，我国全国统一、多层次、面向各类经济主体的具有中国特色的债券市场框架基本形成，银行间、柜台和交易所三个债券子市场各有侧重、相互连通和互动。本从债券市场机制和框架形成角度，对我国债券市场10余年的发展轨迹进行了全面回顾和分析。在此基础上，对我国债券市场进一步深化发展提出了若干建议。     

可转债分拆交易研究——台湾经验借鉴与国内创新

本文旨在对可转债分拆交易的理论研究和台湾实践经验进行梳理的基础上,为国内可转债分拆的交易框架和定价设计提供借鉴。本文的结构安排如下:首先,对可转债分拆交易的相关文献进行综述;其次,阐述可转债分拆的交易结构与理论定价;再次,介绍台湾可转债分拆交易的现实定价与法律框架;最后,结合国内的发展现状,提出国内可转债分拆交易的相关制度设计框架,并给出了进一步的政策建议。     

DETERMINANTS OF SOVEREIGN BONDS RATINGS: A ROBUSTNESS ANALYSIS

Several studies have attempted to deduce the determinants of sovereign bond ratings. In this study, Extreme Bounds Analysis is applied to approximately 30 factors proposed by the literature in order to assess their robustness with a focus on the relative importance that economic and political variables receive in the shaping of the ratings. We find that policies that constrain the public sector are among the most robust. Variables such as rule of law, openness to economic flows, central bank independence, and market friendly policies are found to be more robustly correlated with the ratings than foreign reserves, fiscal deficit, sovereign bond yields, and economic growth.     

Oil price shocks and volatility spillovers in the Nigerian sovereign bond market

This paper investigates volatility spillover in the Nigerian sovereign bond market arising from oil price shocks, using Vector Autoregressive Moving Average ‐ Asymmetric Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (VARMA‐AGARCH) model. The paper covers the period March 22, 2011 to April 14, 2016 and makes use of the daily data of the Nigerian Sovereign Bond, Brent oil and West Texas Intermediate (WTI), respectively. We endogenously and sequentially detect structural break points using the test of Bai and Perron (2003) framework. In order to accurately estimate the model, we modify it by incorporating the break points into the VARMA‐AGARCH model, a process which if ignored would lead to model misspecification. The results obtained demonstrate a significant cross‐market volatility transmission between oil and sovereign bond market with ample sensitivity to structural breaks. The study also computes optimum weight portfolio and hedge ratio both with and without structural breaks and results equally indicate sensitivity to structural breaks.     

A gradient boosting approach to the Kaggle load forecasting competition

We describe and analyse the approach used by Team TinTin (Souhaib Ben Taieb and Rob J Hyndman) in the Load Forecasting track of the Kaggle Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2012. The competition involved a hierarchical load forecasting problem for a US utility with 20 geographical zones. The data available consisted of the hourly loads for the 20 zones and hourly temperatures from 11 weather stations, for four and a half years. For each zone, the hourly electricity loads for nine different weeks needed to be predicted without having the locations of either the zones or stations. We used separate models for each hourly period, with component-wise gradient boosting for estimating each model using univariate penalised regression splines as base learners. The models allow for the electricity demand changing with the time-of-year, day-of-week, time-of-day, and on public holidays, with the main predictors being current and past temperatures, and past demand. Team TinTin ranked fifth out of 105 participating teams.