Three Essays on the Term Structure of Interest Rates

Three Essays on the Term Structure of Interest Rates
Author: Jean-Guy Simonato
Publisher:
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1994
Genre: Interest rates
ISBN:

"This dissertation is formed of three essays on the term structure of interest rates. The first essay compares Kalman filter and GMM methodologies for parameter estimation of log-linear term structure models. The second essay develops the maximum likelihood estimation of a deposit insurance pricing model with stochastic interest rates. The third essay examines the empirical performance of an equilibrium model of nominal bond prices with changing inflation regimes." --

Three Essays on Savings and the Term Structure of Lending

Three Essays on Savings and the Term Structure of Lending
Author: Hernando Vargas
Publisher:
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1994
Genre: Capital costs
ISBN:

This dissertation explores two subjects. The first one is the relationship between low liquidity in secondary markets for capital and the insufficient supply of long term funding for productive investment. The first chapter shows how shallow or non-existent secondary markets for capital can induce a short term bias in lending, a problem observed in developing countries. A general equilibrium model is developed with government debt and private capital that is costly to trade. The transaction costs reduce the proportion of savings held as capital. Three main results are established. First, larger government deficits cause a greater proportion of savings to be held as debt. Second, deficit finance alternatives (taxes vs. debt) have different effects on investment. And third, a rationale is provided for why intermediation occurs when capital trading is costly. The second subject studied in this dissertation is the effect of incomplete insurance on individual savings. The second chapter compares a two-period-lived, risk-averse agent's optimal consumption decision under complete and incomplete markets in the presence of labor income uncertainty. Initially, markets are completed by Arrow-Debreu securities and a risk-free asset. Then, the market for a contingent claim is closed, and the change in the individual's current consumption is examined, assuming that the prices of the remaining assets are constant. Two results are derived. First, the change in the risk-free asset position is a non-negative fraction of the insurance lost when a contingent claim market is eliminated. Second, if the utility function exhibits constant absolute risk aversion, savings increase whenever an insurance market is removed. If the utility function displays constant relative risk aversion and under complete markets high consumption states are associated with negative insurance, or low consumption states with positive insurance, then the elimination of one contingent claim market increases savings. The third chapter extends some of these results to situations in which markets are initially incomplete, and then a contingent claim market is removed.

Three Essays in Monetary Theory

Three Essays in Monetary Theory
Author: Ludwig Van den Hauwe
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2009
Genre: Monetary policy
ISBN: 2810602212

Recent events in international financial markets have revived the scientific interest in conceivable institutional alternatives to prevailing monetary arrangements. In the essays reprinted in this book, the author critically examines some of the more influential arguments which have been made in favour of decentralization in banking.

Three Essays on Asset Pricing

Three Essays on Asset Pricing
Author: Ji Zhou
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

This thesis consists of three essays. In the first essay, we derive a pricing kernel for a continuous-time long-run risks (LRR) economy with the Epstein-Zin utility function, non-i.i.d. consumption growth, and incomplete information about fundamentals. In equilibrium, agents learn about latent conditional mean of consumption growth and price equity simultaneously. Since the pricing kernel is endogenous and affected by learning, uncertainty about unobserved conditional mean of consumption growth affects risk prices corresponding to shocks in both consumption and dividend growth. We demonstrate our analytical results by applying the model to a profitability-based equity valuation model proposed by Pastor and Veronesi (2003). Calibration of the model demonstrates that the LRR model with learning has potential to fit levels of price-dividend ratios of the S&P 500 Composite Index, equity premium, and the short term interest rate simultaneously. In essay two, we extend the LRR model with incomplete information proposed in essay one by incorporating inflation and applying the model to the valuation of nominal term structure of interest rate. We estimate the processes of state variables and latent variables using a Bayesian Markov-Chain Monte Carlo method. In the estimation, we rely only on the information in macro-economic data on aggregate consumption growth, inflation, and dividend growth on S&P 500 Composite Index. In this way, parameters and latent state variables are estimated outside the model. Estimation results suggest a mildly persistent LRR component. However, both real and nominal yield curves implied by the LRR model are downward-sloping. We show that the inverted yield curve is due to a negative risk premium, which is determined jointly by covariance between shocks in state variables and shocks in the nominal pricing kernel. Incorporating learning about the mean consumption growth flattens the yield curve but does not change the sign of the yield curve slope. In essay three, we study the critique of the conditional affine factor asset pricing models proposed by Lewellen and Nagel (2006). They suggest that two important economic constraints are overlooked in cross-sectional regressions. First, the estimated unconditional slope associated with a risk factor should equal the average risk premium on that factor in a conditional model. Second, the estimated slope associated with the product of a risk factor and an instrument should be equal to the covariance of the factor risk premium with the instrument. We test both constraints on conditional models with time-varying betas and our results confirm the proposition. Also, from the functional relationship between conditional and unconditional betas, we identify an unconditional constraint on unconditional betas for time-varying beta models and develop a testing procedure subject to this constraint. We show that imposing this unconditional constraint changes estimates of unconditional betas and risk prices significantly.