This paper uses a unique financial instrument in the U.S. Treasury market to study the price behavior of the put option embedded in the November 2009 14 callable U.S. Treasury bond. We find that, beginning in August 1993, the estimated option value was persistently negative on nearly every day for the ensuing eight months. We show that the anomalous pricing behavior arose because the underlying callable bond became the cheapest to deliver issue against U.S. Treasury bond futures contracts. Hence, this paper provides direct evidence that derivative assets can significantly distort pricing in the primary asset market.

We investigate pricing relations and the potential for arbitrage in the U.S. Treasury STRIPS market, stressing the importance of reconciling quoted Treasury data with actual market pricing conventions. We document that stripping and reconstitution profits in the STRIPS market are fleeting and rarely economically significant; that matched-maturity principal and coupon STRIPS generally have different prices due, at least in part, to richness or cheapness in the underlying note or bond; and that apparent negative forward rates in the STRIPS market are concentrated in certain long-maturity STRIPS that do not actually exist at the time.