Term premia implied by maximum likelihood estimates of affine term structure models are misleading because of small-sample bias. We show that accounting for this bias alters the conclusions about the trend, cycle, and macroeconomic determinants of the term premia estimated in Wright (2011). His term premium estimates are essentially acyclical, and often just parallel the secular trend in long-term interest rates. In contrast, bias-corrected term premia show pronounced counter-cyclical behavior, consistent with theoretical and empirical arguments about movements in risk premia.

This paper provides new evidence on the importance of inflation expectations for high-frequency variation in long-term nominal interest rates, based on both market-based measures from TIPS and swaps markets and survey-based measures of inflation expectations. Daily changes in break-even inflation and changes in nominal rates generally display a close statistical relationship, with the exception of the recent financial crisis, and the sensitivity of break-even inflation to macroeconomic data surprises explains a sizable share of the macro response of nominal rates. Various survey-based measures of inflation expectations exhibit statistically and economically significant responses to macro news. These findings are consistent with expectations formation according to estimated policy rules in which the Taylor principle holds and variation in inflation explains most of the variation in the policy rate.

Previous research has established that the Federal Reserve large scale asset purchases (LSAPs) significantly influenced international bond yields. This paper analyzes the channels through which these effects occurred. We use dynamic term structure models to decompose international yield changes into changes in term premia and expected short rates. The conclusions for most countries are model dependent. Models that impose a unit root tend to imply large signaling effects for Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States. Models that do not restrict persistence imply negligible signaling effects for any country. Our preferred bias-corrected model implies large signaling effects for Canada and the United States. The idea that LSAP announcements signal information about Canadian rates is intuitively attractive because conventional US monetary policy shocks strongly predict Canadian rates.

Previous research has emphasized the portfolio balance effects of Federal Reserve bond purchases, in which a reduced bond supply lowers term premia. In contrast, we find that such purchases have important signaling effects that lower expected future short-term interest rates. Our evidence comes from a model-free analysis and from dynamic term structure models that decompose declines in yields following Fed announcements into changes in risk premia and expected short rates. To overcome problems in measuring term premia, we consider bias-corrected model estimation and restricted risk price estimation. We also characterize the estimation uncertainty regarding the relative importance of the signaling and portfolio balance channels.

How do interest rates react to news? This paper presents a new methodology, based on a simple dynamic term structure model, which provides for an integrated analysis of the effects of monetary policy actions and macroeconomic news on the term structure of interest rates. I find several new empirical results: First, monetary policy directly affects distant forward rates. Second, policy news is more complex than macro news. Third, while payroll news causes the most action in interest rates, it does not affect distant forward rates. Fourth, the term structure response to macro news is consistent with considerable interest rate smoothing.

This paper performs Bayesian estimation of affine Gaussian dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) in which the risk price parameters are restricted. A new econometric framework for DTSM estimation allows the researcher to select plausible constraints from a large set of restrictions, to correctly quantify statistical uncertainty, and to incorporate model uncertainty. The main empirical result is that under the restrictions favored by the data the expectations component, and not the term premium, accounts for the majority of high-frequency movements of long-term interest rates. At lower frequencies, term premia are counter-cyclical and more stable than implied by DTSMs without risk price restrictions.

The affine dynamic term structure model (DTSM) is the canonical empirical finance representation of the yield curve. However, the possibility that DTSM estimates may be distorted by small-sample bias has been largely ignored. We show that conventional estimates of DTSM coefficients are indeed severely biased, and this bias results in misleading estimates of expected future short-term interest rates and of long-maturity term premia. We provide a variety of bias-corrected estimates of affine DTSMs, both for maximally-flexible and over-identified specifications. Our estimates imply short rate expectations and term premia that are more plausible from a macro-finance perspective.

Models of endogenous growth have strong empirical predictions about the determinants of technological progress. This thesis details the implications of alternative R&D-based endogenous growth models, and then surveys the empirical literature that tests different aspects of this New Growth Theory. Numerous studies attempt to test the validity of endogenous growth models but come to very different conclusions, since varying hypotheses are considered. There are few rigorous and plausible empirical assessments of whether the determinants of technological progress conform to the predictions of the theory. I provide new evidence on the relevance of R&D intensity for economic growth, using dynamic panel data methods, thereby contributing to the empirical literature that finds support for R&D-based endogenous growth models.