An Admissible Macro-Finance Model of the US Treasury Market

Abstract

This paper develops a macro-finance model of the yield curve and uses this to explain the behavior of the US Treasury market. Unlike previous macro-finance models which assume a homoscedastic error process and suppose that the one-period return is directly observable, I develop a general affine model which relaxes these assumptions. My empirical specification uses a single conditioning factor and is thus the macro-finance analogue of the EA1(N) specification of the mainstream finance literature. This model provides a decisive rejection of the standard EA0(N) macro-finance specification. The resulting specification provides a flexible 10-factor explanation of the behavior of the US yield curve, keying it in to the behavior of the macroeconomy.

JEL Classification: C13, C32, E30, E44, E52