This paper revisits the study of time-varying excess bond returns in international bond markets. Using newly available yield curve data from 10 different countries with independent monetary policy, I test the robustness of Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). For most countries in my sample, I find more modest predictive power for forward rates than originally found by Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) for the US. Their single-factor model captures well the predictability in international data, and this factor also tends to have a tent-shape in most countries of my sample. CP factors are more idiosyncratic across countries than yields or forward rates. Finally, I show that the recent financial crisis has significantly affected the predictability of excess bond returns.

This paper investigates the importance of U.S. macroeconomic news in driving low-frequency fluctuations in the term structure of interest rates in Canada, Sweden, and the U.K. We follow two complementary approaches: First, we apply a regression-based framework that aggregates the impact of daily macroeconomic news on bond yields to a lower quarterly frequency. Next, we estimate a macro-finance affine term structure model linking the daily news to lower-frequency changes in bond yields and its expectations and term premia components. Both approaches show that U.S. macroeconomic news is an important source of lower-frequency quarterly fluctuations in bond yields in these open economies, and even more important than their respective domestic macroeconomic news. Furthermore, the macro-finance model shows that U.S. macroeconomic news is particularly important in explaining low-frequency changes in the expectation components of the nominal, real, and break-even inflation rates.