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Review of Financial Studies Vol. 35 No. 8 2022

Subjective Bond Returns and Belief Aggregation

Andrea Buraschi1; Ilaria Piatti2; Paul Whelan3

1 Imperial College Business School · 2 School of Economics and Finance, Queen Mary University of London · 3 Copenhagen Business School

open access

Abstract

This paper proposes an aggregation scheme of subjective bond return expectations based on the historical accuracy of professional interest rate forecasters. We use disaggregated survey data on bond returns and document large disagreement in the cross-sectional distribution and persistence in forecast accuracy. Our aggregate subjective belief proxy outperforms equal weighting schemes, and its dynamics are significantly different from statistical forecasting models. With this measure in hand, we study the relationship between quantities of risk and subjective expectations of excess returns and demonstrate a strong link between the two, even if such a relationship is difficult to detect using realized returns.

DOI
10.1093/rfs/hhab115
Volume
35
Issue
8
Pages
3710-3741
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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