The Flight-to-Liquidity Premium in U.S. Treasury Bond Prices

We examine whether there is a flight-to-liquidity premium in Treasury bond prices by comparing them with prices of bonds issued by Refcorp, a U.S. Government agency, which are guaranteed by the Treasury. We find a large liquidity premium in Treasury bonds, which can be more than fifteen percent of the value of some Treasury bonds. This liquidity premium is related to changes in consumer confidence, the amount of Treasury debt available to investors, and flows into equity and money market mutual funds. This suggests that the popularity of Treasury bonds directly a.ects their value.

An Empirical Analysis of the Pricing of Collateralized Debt Obligations

We study the pricing of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) using an extensive new data set for the actively-traded CDX credit index and its tranches. We find that a three-factor portfolio credit model allowing for firm-specific, industry, and economywide default events explains virtually all of the time-series and crosssectional variation in CDX index tranche prices. These tranches are priced as if losses of 0.4, 6, and 35 percent of the portfolio occur with expected frequencies of 1.2, 41.5, and 763 years, respectively. On average, 65 percent of the CDX spread is due to firm-specific default risk, 27 percent to clustered industry or sector default risk, and 8 percent to catastrophic or systemic default risk. Recently, however, firm-specific default risk has begun to play a larger role.

Dynamic Asset Allocation With Event Risk

Major events often trigger abrupt changes in stock prices and volatility. We study the implications of jumps in prices and volatility on investment strategies. Using the event-risk framework of Duffie, Pan, and Singleton (2000), we provide analytical solutions to the optimal portfolio problem. Event risk dramatically affects the optimal strategy. An investor facing event risk is less willing to take leveraged or short positions. The investor acts as if some portion of his wealth may become illiquid and the optimal strategy blends both dynamic and buy-and-hold strategies. Jumps in prices and volatility both have important effects.

Corporate Yield Spreads: Default Risk or Liquidity? New Evidence from the Credit-Default Swap Market

We use the information in credit-default swaps to obtain direct measures of the size of the default and nondefault components in corporate spreads. We find that the majority of the corporate spread is due to default risk. This result holds for all rating categories and is robust to the definition of the riskless curve. We also find that the nondefault component is time varying and strongly related to measures of bond-specific illiquidity as well as to macroeconomic measures of bond-market liquidity.

Paper millionaires: How valuable is stock to a stockholder who is restricted from selling it?

Many firms have stockholders who face severe restrictions on their ability to sell their shares and diversify the risk of their personal wealth. We study the costs of these liquidity restrictions on stockholders using a continuous-time portfolio choice framework. These restrictions have major effects on the optimal investment and consumption strategies because of the need to hedge the illiquid stock position and smooth consumption in anticipation of the eventual lapse of the restrictions. These results provide a number of important insights about the effects of illiquidity in financial markets.

Optimal Recursive Refinancing and the Valuation of Mortgage-Backed Securities

We study the optimal recursive refinancing problem where a borrower minimizes his lifetime mortgage costs by repeatedly refinancing when rates drop sufficiently. Key factors affecting the optimal decision are the cost of refinancing and the possibility that the mortgagor may have to refinance at a premium rate because of his credit. The optimal recursive strategy often results in prepayment being delayed significantly relative to traditional models. Furthermore, mortgage values can exceed par by much more than the cost of refinancing. Applying the recursive model to an extensive sample of mortgage-backed security prices, we find that the implied credit spreads that match these prices closely parallel borrowers' actual spreads at the origination of the mortgage. These results suggest that optimal recursive models may provide a promising alternative to the reduced-form prepayment models widely used in practice.

The Market Price of Credit Risk: An Empirical Analysis of Interest Rate Swap Spreads

This paper studies the market price of credit risk incorporated into one of the most important credit spreads in the financial markets: interest rate swap spreads. Our approach consists of jointly modeling the swap and Treasury term structures using a general five-factor affine credit framework and estimating the parameters by maximum likelihood. We solve for the implied special financing rate for Treasury bonds and find that the liquidity component of on-the-run bond prices can be significant. We also find that credit premia in swap spreads are positive on average. These premia, however, vary significantly over time and were actually negative for much of the 1990s.

Macroeconomic Effects of Corporate Default Crises: A Long-Term Perspective

Using an extensive new data set on corporate bond defaults in the U.S. from 1866 to 2010, we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises. During the past 150 years, the U.S. has experienced many severe corporate default crises in which 20 to 50 percent of all corporate bonds defaulted. Although the total par amount of corporate bonds has often rivaled the amount of bank loans outstanding, we find that corporate default crises have far fewer real effects than do banking crises. These results provide empirical support for current theories that emphasize the unique role that banks and the credit and collateral channels play in amplifying macroeconomic shocks.

Two Trees: Asset Price Dynamics Induced by Market Clearing

If stocks go up, investors may want to rebalance their portfolios. But investors cannot all rebalance. Expected returns may need to change so that the average investor is still happy to hold the market portfolio despite its changed composition. In this way, simple market clearing can give rise to complex asset market dynamics. We study this phenomenon in a very simple model. Our model has two Lucas trees.' Each tree has i.i.d.dividend growth, and the representative investor has log utility. We are able to give analytical solutions to the model. Despite this simple setup, price-dividend ratios, expected returns, and return variances vary through time. A dividend shock leads to underreaction' in some states, as expected returns rise and prices slowly adjust, and overreaction' in others. Expected returns and excess returns are predictable by price-dividend ratios in the time series and in the cross section, roughly matching value effects and return forecasting regressions. Returns generally display positive serial correlation and negative cross-serial correlation, leading to 'momentuem,' but the opposite signs are possible as well. A shock to one asset's dividend a.ects the price and expected return of the other asset, leading to substantial correlation of returns even when there is no correlation of cash flows and giving the appearance of contagion.' Market clearing allows the inverse portfolio' problem to be solved, in which the weights of the assets in the market portfolio are inverted' to solve for the parameters of the assets' return generating process.

Systemic Sovereign Credit Risk: Lessons from the U.S. and Europe

We study the nature of systemic sovereign credit risk using CDS spreads for the U.S. Treasury, individual U.S. states, and major European countries. Using a multifactor affine framework that allows for both systemic and sovereign-specific credit shocks, we find that there is considerable heterogeneity across U.S. and European issuers in their sensitivity to systemic risk. U.S. and Euro systemic shocks are highly correlated, but there is much less systemic risk among U.S. sovereigns than among European sovereigns. We also find that U.S. and European systemic sovereign risk is strongly related to financial market variables. These results provide strong support for the view that systemic sovereign risk has its roots in financial markets rather than in macroeconomic fundamentals.