Secular declines in global sovereign yields are concentrated in short event windows around U.S. monetary policy announcement dates. Cumulative changes in sovereign yields during FOMC announcement dates contain critical information for explaining the persistent variations in the yields, predicting future yields and excess bond returns, and determining interest rate expectations and term premia. We build a dynamic term structure model with shifting endpoints to study the effects of U.S. monetary policy on world yield curves. Our findings highlight that U.S. monetary policy drives the secular declines in global interest rates by reducing expected interest rates.

Secular declines in U.S. Treasury yields are concentrated in three-day windows around FOMC announcement dates. Cumulative yield changes during these short windows explain the secular decline in yields. This factor contains essential information on excess bond returns and outperforms well-known proxies for interest rate trends in prediction regressions. We estimate a dynamic term structure model to explain these empirical facts. The model suggests that the secular declines in Treasury yields over the past three decades were primarily due to reductions in expected interest rates, mostly during the FOMC announcement windows.

This paper proposes a novel bond return (price or yield curve) prediction methodology, unifying the classical no arbitrage pricing framework, which is ubiquitous and serves as a fundamental and theoretical building block in mathematical finance, and empirical asset (bond) pricing methodologies, e.g., Bianchi, Büchner, & Tamoni (2021) for treasury bonds and Gu, Kelly, & Xiu (2020) for equities. The methodology can be viewed as a unification of theoretical and empirical asset pricing frameworks. Our method is mathematically and theoretically rigorous, arbitrage-free and meantime enjoys the flexibility offered by the empirical asset pricing framework, i.e., a potentially rich factor structure and accurate function approximations via machine learning regression. Real market back-testing studies show that our predictions are accurate, in the sense that the formulated equally-weighted treasury bond portfolios in China exchange-based markets bear significant positive returns. The average hit rate for yield curve prediction reaches 77.71% across all tenors and the related long-only trading strategy based on the prediction results in an annualized absolute return as high as 12.35% with Calmar ratio achieving 7.31 for equally-weighted portfolios. As a by-product of our prediction framework, spot yield curves can be predicted accurately in an arbitrage-free manner.

The aim of the study is to investigate the behaviour of the Chinese government bond yield curve before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its methodology comprises the techniques of time series analysis, correlation analysis and dimensionality reduction. The main empirical results show that in the pandemic period, the behaviour of the Chinese government bond yield curve differs significantly from that before the outbreak of COVID-19. This is evidenced by the weaker correlations among the analysed yields, the presence of anomalies, heterogeneous behaviour and probable arbitrage opportunities at the long-term end of the studied yield curve, as well as the significant changes in the main factors of its dynamics. The research also reveals that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, portfolios composed of Chinese government bonds could be well protected against interest rate risk even by using traditional parallel shift immunization techniques. However, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic the use of such techniques would be relatively effective for portfolios of Chinese government bonds with maturities between 1 and 5 years, while portfolios that include Chinese government bonds with maturities greater than 7 years should be either hedged against all the three factors of the yield curve dynamics or be used only for arbitrage strategies.

Studies of the dynamics of bond risk premia that do not account for the corresponding dynamics of bond risk are hard to interpret. We propose a new approach to modeling bond risk and risk premia. For each of the US and China, we reduce the government bond market to its first two principal-component bond-factor portfolios. For each bond-factor portfolio, we estimate the joint dynamics of its volatility and Sharpe ratio as functions of yield curve variables, and of VIX in the US. We have three main findings.(1) There is an important second factor in bond risk premia. (2) Time variation in bond return volatility is as important as time variation in bond Sharpe ratios. (3) Bond risk premia are solely compensation for bond risk, as no-arbitrage theory predicts. Our approach also allows us to document interesting cyclical and secular time-variation in the term structure of bond risk premia in both the US and China.

We identify both dynamic and long-run relationships between each of the level, slope and curvature factors of the Treasury and corporate bond markets yield curve in China. We aim at determining which market plays a leading role in the discovery of each factor of the yield curve. We obtain three main results. First, we document for the first time the presence of a long-run relationship between the corporate and Treasury bond markets in China both for the level and the slope of their yield curve. Second, such a long-run relationship appears to be stable between the slopes over the full sample 2006-2017, but shows a break for the level factor in 2012. Third, the source market for price discovery varies with the parameters of the yield curve. While the corporate bond market is the source of price discovery for the level factor, this function is fulfilled by the government bond market for the slope parameter. The finding that the Treasury bond market is not fully dominant in level bond-pricing may not come as a surprise. Although China’s corporate bond market has developed rapidly in the past fifteen years, there were few default cases during that period. It is believed investors treat the default risk of corporate bonds as similar to that of Treasury bonds, and benefit from the high corporate spread. Our results for the slope parameter imply that market-oriented reform has progressed enough for the Treasury bond market to already provide a benchmark slope for the yield curve of corporate bonds. When the reform progresses further, we would expect corporate bonds to be priced according to their risk profile which should make the Treasury market lead in price discovery also for the level of the yield curve.

In this paper, using a set of zero yield curve data of China’s government bonds and credit bonds, along with China’s aggregate credit risk measures, and macroeconomic variables from 2006 to 2013, we document a puzzle of counter-credit-risk corporate yield spreads. We interpret this puzzle as a symptom of the immaturity of China’s credit bond market, which reveals a distorted pricing mechanism latent in the fundamental of this market. As by-products of our analysis, we also find interesting results about relations between corporate yield spreads and interest rates as well as risk premia and the stock index, and these results are somewhat attributed to this puzzle.

China’s financial prices are informative enough for the PBC to introduce a monetary policy framework centered around interest rates. While bond yields are not fully efficient—reflecting regulation, liquidity, and segmentation—we find they contain considerable information about the state of the economy as well as evidence of an emerging transmission channel: changes in PBC rates influence the structure of Treasury, financial, and corporate bond yield curves, which are then associated with changes in growth and inflation. Coporate spreads are also a leading indicator of growth and inflation. While further liberalization will strengthen both efficiency and transmission, several necessary elements to move towards indirect monetary policy are already in place.

The forecast ability of term structure is tested in this paper with the data of interbank treasury yield curve of Chinabond. The results show that there are positive relationships between term structure and the changes of future macro economy, i.e. GDP, consumption, production and inflation, which is similar with the studies of the developed countries. The term structure can predict the mid-term economic growth well, even considering the effects of monetary policy and another leading indicator. With the regression results, the out-of-sample predictions show a lower and decreasing growth rate in the next two years, implying greater challenges to the policy-makers.

The purpose of this thesis is to provide an exposition of the theories underpinning the term structure of interest rates in relation to empirical literatures; also it aims to address the implications for the shape of the yield curve to with regard to its predictive ability of economy’s future direction.