Frank de Jong, Pedro Santa-Clara, The Dynamics of the Forward Interest Rate Curve: A Formulation with State Variables, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 131-157

We use an asset pricing approach to compare the effects of the liquidity level and liquidity risk on expected U.S. corporate bond returns. Using signed transaction data, we estimate effective transaction costs for bond portfolios by a repeat-sales method. We find that the liquidity level and exposure to equity market liquidity risk affect expected bond returns. In contrast, exposure to corporate bond liquidity shocks carries an economically negligible risk premium. A simulation study shows that it is unlikely that our results are driven by measurement error in betas or multicollinearity. We present a simple theoretical model that explains these findings.

This paper proposes an extended market model for event studies based on daily stock returns. For actual data the assumptions of the simple market model are violated. The return distribution is not normal and neither the variance of the error term nor the risk parameter beta are constant. Our model incorporates the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (garch) model with t-distributed errors and a time-dependent beta. We test for anomalies by adding dummy variables in the regression equation. Our model is fairly general and could be used in a wide variety of event study situations. We illustrate the model by an analysis of the weekend and the option-expiration effect. We use return data from the Dutch stock market. The weekend effect on stock returns is significant, but no expiration effect could be detected.

The average firm going public or issuing new equity underperforms the market in the long run. This underperformance could be related to the endogeneity of the number of new issues if new issues cluster after periods of high abnormal returns on new issues. In such a case, ex post measures of new issue abnormal returns may be negative on average, despite the absence of ex ante abnormal returns. We evaluate this endogeneity problem in event studies of long-run performance. We argue that it is unlikely that the endogeneity of the number of new issues explains the long-run underperformance of equity issues.

In rational, efficiently functioning and complete markets, returns on derivative and underlying securities should be perfectly contemporaneously correlated. Due to market imperfections, one of these markets may reflect information faster. The use of high-frequency data and the choice for a small unit time interval to measure these lead-lag relations comes at the cost of some or many missing observations, causing traditional estimators to either under- or overestimate covariances and correlations. We use a new estimator to estimate lead-lag relationships between the cash AEX index, options and futures. We find that futures returns lead both options and cash index returns by approximately 10 minutes. The relationship between options and the cash market is not completely unidirectional.

We estimate a model for the term structure of discounted risk-adjusted dividend growth using prices of dividend futures for the Eurostoxx 50. A 2-factor model capturing short-term mean reversion within a year and a medium-term component reverting at the business-cycle horizon gives an excellent fit of these prices. Hence, investors update the valuation of dividends beyond the business cycle only to a limited degree. The 2-factor model, estimated on dividend futures data only, explains a large part of observed daily stock market returns. We also show that the 2 latent factors are related to various economic and financial variables.

We empirically compare Libor and Swap Market Models for the pricing of interest rate derivatives, using panel data on prices of US caplets and swaptions. A Libor Market Model can directly be calibrated to observed prices of caplets, whereas a Swap Market Model is calibrated to a certain set of swaption prices. For both models we analyze how well they price caplets and swaptions that were not used for calibration. We show that the Libor Market Model in general leads to better prediction of derivative prices that were not used for calibration than the Swap Market Model. Also, we find that Market Models with a declining volatility function give much better pricing results than a specification with a constant volatility function. Finally, we find that models that arechosen to exactly match certain derivative prices are overfitted; more parsimonious models lead to better predictions for derivative prices that were not used for calibration.

Two important characteristics of current equity markets are the large number of competing trading venues with publicly displayed order books and the substantial fraction of dark trading, which takes place outside such visible order books. This article evaluates the impact on liquidity of dark trading and fragmentation in visible order books. Dark trading has a detrimental effect on liquidity. Visible fragmentation improves liquidity aggregated over all visible trading venues but lowers liquidity at the traditional market, meaning that the benefits of fragmentation are not enjoyed by investors who choose to send orders only to the traditional market.

We show that new public debt issues cause an auction cycle for Italian secondary-market debt, but not for German debt. The cycle is mainly observed for the crisis period since mid-2007 and is larger when the crisis, as measured by yield volatility and CDS spreads of primary dealers, is more intense. Volatility seems to be the main driving factor. The cycle is also present in secondary-market series with maturities close to the auctioned series. Our findings are consistent with the theory of primary dealers’ limited risk-bearing capacity. There is also weak evidence of spill-overs from foreign auctions to domestic markets.