I compare the direct issuance costs of inflation-linked debt (the liquidity premium) with nominal government debt (the inflation risk premium) in developed countries. On average, it is cheaper to issue nominal debt at medium maturities (5–10 years) and inflation-linked debt at long maturities (20 or more years), although results vary somewhat based on whether survey-based or statistical inflation expectations are used. Issuance costs exhibit pronounced time and cross-country variation. Lower inflation-linked debt issuance costs are associated with more countercyclical inflation and higher proportions of inflation-linked debt. International inflation-linked zero-coupon yields are available as an Internet Appendix to this paper. (JEL E31, E43, G12, G15, H30, H63) Received November 22, 2018; editorial decision March 9, 2021 by Editor Jeffrey Pontiff.

I study the sufficiency of macroeconomic information to explain the time-variation in second moments of stock and bond returns, with a particular attention to stock-bond correlations. I propose an external habit model supplemented with realistic non-Gaussian fundamentals estimated solely from macroeconomic data. Intertemporal smoothing and precautionary savings effects – driven by consumption shocks – combine with a time-varying covariance between consumption and inflation to generate large positive and negative stock-bond return correlations. Macroeconomic shocks are most important in explaining second moments of stock and bond returns from the late 1970’s to mid-1990’s and during the Great Recession.

We decompose long-term nominal bond yields into real and inflation components in an international context using inflation-linked and nominal bonds. In contrast to extant results, real rate variation dominates the variation in inflation-linked and nominal yields. Cross-country nominal and inflation-linked yield correlations have declined since the Great Recession. Real rates are the main source of the correlation between nominal yields. Our results are robust to various alternative measurements of inflation expectations and the liquidity premium. They continue to hold when a no-arbitrage term structure model with real, nominal, and inflation factors is used to effect the yield decomposition.

The equity variance risk premium is the expected compensation earned for selling variance risk in equity markets. The variance risk premium is positive and shows only moderate persistence. High variance risk premiums coincide with the left tail of the consumption growth distribution shifting down. These facts, together with risk-neutral skewness being substantially more negative than physical return skewness, refute the bulk of the extant consumption-based asset pricing models. We introduce a tractable habit model that does fit the data. In the model, the variance risk premium depends positively (or negatively) on “bad” (or “good”) consumption growth uncertainty.

We use non-Gaussian features in U.S. macroeconomic data to identify aggregate supply and demand shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. Macro risks represent the variables that govern the time-varying variance, skewness, and higher-order moments of these two shocks, with ”good” (”bad”) variance associated with positive (negative) skewness. We document that macro risks significantly contribute to the variation of yields and risk premiums for nominal bonds. While overall bond risk premiums are countercyclical, an increase in aggregate demand variance significantly lowers risk premiums. Macro risks also significantly predict future realized bond return variances.