We find that Treasury floating rate notes (FRNs) trade at a significant premium relative to the prices of Treasury bills and notes. This premium is directly related to the near-constant nature of FRN prices and is correlated with measures reflecting investor demand for safe assets. Money market funds are often the primary investors in FRNs, and the FRN premium is related to flows into funds with fixed net asset values, but not to flows into funds with variable net asset values. These results provide strong evidence that the FRN premium represents a convenience yield for the mark-to-market stability feature of FRNs.

Abstract We study the valuation of state-issued tax-exempt municipal bonds and find that there are significant convenience premia in their prices. These premia parallel those identified in Treasury markets. We find evidence that these premia are tax related. Specifically, the premia are related to measures of tax and fiscal uncertainty, forecast flows into state municipal bond funds, and are directly linked to outmigration from high-tax to low-tax states and to other measures of tax aversion such as IRA and retirement plan contributions. These results suggest that investors are willing to pay a substantial premium to avoid taxes.

Abstract We use the prices of credit card asset-backed securities to study the market risk premium associated with unsecured consumer credit risk. We find that the market incorporates a substantial credit risk premium into the prices of these securities. Furthermore, there has been a major repricing of unsecured consumer credit risk since the 2007–2009 financial crisis. We find evidence that this increase is linked to balance-sheet costs imposed by postcrisis changes in regulations that have placed credit card securitizations back onto issuer balance sheets. These regulatory changes may have added more than 100 basis points to the cost of unsecured household credit.

Abstract A long-standing asset pricing puzzle is that the funding rates in derivatives contracts often differ from those in cash markets. We propose that the cost of renting intermediary balance sheet space may help resolve this puzzle. We study a persistent basis in what is arguably the largest derivatives market, namely, the interest rate futures market. This basis is strongly related to exogenous measures of intermediary balance sheet usage and proxies for the balance sheet costs imposed by debt overhang problems and capital regulation. These results extend to the cash derivatives bases documented in many of the other largest financial markets.

ABSTRACT We provide estimates of Treasury convenience premia across the entire term structure of Treasury bills, notes, and bonds over more than a quarter of a century and document a variety of key stylized facts about their time‐series and cross‐sectional patterns. These results raise concerns about the evolving nature of Treasury markets and suggest that investors may now place less weight on the traditional role of Treasury securities as liquid trading vehicles. These stylized facts provide empirical benchmarks that could help guide future theoretical and empirical work about the economics of safe assets in financial markets.

ABSTRACT We present a new approach for estimating small business equity returns. This approach applies the Merton (1974) credit model to the returns on entrepreneurial business credit card debt securitizations and solves for the implied equity returns for the small businesses owned by the cardholders. The estimated small business equity premium is 10.74%. The standard deviation of small business equity returns is 56.37%. We validate the methodology by applying it to investment‐grade corporate bonds and recovering a public equity premium of 6.17%.

We study the nature of deflation risk by extracting the objective distribution of inflation from the market prices of inflation swaps and options. We find that the market expects inflation to average about 2.5% over the next 30 years. Despite this, the market places substantial weight on deflation scenarios in which prices significantly decline over extended horizons. The market prices the economic tail risk of deflation similarly to other types of tail risks, such as corporate default or catastrophic insurance losses. We find that deflation risk is strongly negatively correlated with outcomes in the financial markets and with consumer confidence. Received January 26, 2015; editorial decision November 14, 2016 by Editor Leonid Kogan.

We study the nature of deflation risk by extracting the objective distribution of inflation from the market prices of inflation swaps and options. We find that the market expects inflation to average about 2.5% over the next 30 years. Despite this, the market places substantial weight on deflation scenarios in which prices significantly decline over extended horizons. The market prices the economic tail risk of deflation similarly to other types of tail risks, such as corporate default or catastrophic insurance losses. We find that deflation risk is strongly negatively correlated with outcomes in the financial markets and with consumer confidence.

ABSTRACT We show that the price of a Treasury bond and an inflation‐swapped Treasury Inflation‐Protected Securities (TIPS) issue exactly replicating the cash flows of the Treasury bond can differ by more than $20 per $100 notional. Treasury bonds are almost always overvalued relative to TIPS. Total TIPS‐Treasury mispricing has exceeded $56 billion, representing nearly 8% of the total amount of TIPS outstanding. We find direct evidence that the mispricing narrows as additional capital flows into the markets. This provides strong support for the slow‐moving‐capital explanation of arbitrage persistence.

We show that at-the-money implied volatility of options on futures of five-year Treasury notes (Treasury “yield implied volatility”) predicts both the growth rate and volatility of gross domestic product, as well as of other macroeconomic variables, like industrial production, consumption, and employment. This predictability is robust to controlling for the term spread, credit spread, stock returns, stock market implied volatility, and several other variables that prior literature showed to predict macroeconomic activity. Our results indicate that Treasury yield implied volatility is a useful forward-looking state variable to characterize risks and opportunities in the macro economy.