Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Economics

Advisor

Liuren Wu

Advisor

Liuren Wu

Committee Members

Liuren Wu

Michael Grossman

Jian Hua

Subject Categories

Finance

Keywords

Term structure models, Bond risk premia

Abstract

This thesis focuses on zero-coupon bond risk premia. In chapter 1 first I summarize the literature that defines expectation hypothesis, time variation in bond risk premia, well known macroeconomic and variety of technical indicators which predict bond return forecasts. Then, I continue with introducing a high dimensional affine dynamic term structure model and unscented Kalman filtering as its estimation technique.In chapter 2, I explore predictive capacity of the estimated latent states of this term structure model. I constructed a single return forecasting factor by using these states. I report comparison of well known excess bond return forecasting factors' predictive performance with the one I construct. I found that this single factor has superior performance in predicting excess bond returns and future macro activity especially for the sample period which includes the Great Recession. In chapter 3, I develop a two step estimation technique to extract market price of risk from time dimension of zero-coupon bond prices. I also provide robustness results in this chapter.

Included in

Finance Commons

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