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.

China's local government debt financing grows rapidly featuring surging chengtou bond issuance and risk exposure since the global financial crisis in 2008. The accumulation of local government debt poses systemic risks to China's fiscal and financial systems. Using weekly data from 2009 to 2014, this paper studies the joint dynamics and risk transmission mechanism between chengtou bond spreads and treasury yields under the framework of the extended no-arbitrage Nelson-Seigel term structure model, which guarantees the no-arbitrage relationship between treasury yields of different maturities. The results show that the chengtou bonds indeed exhibit considerable local risks and can lead to systemic risk of the treasury bonds, such that the treasury yields have significant component of risk premium due to chengtou risk. On the other hand, as the safest asset in China at present, the treasury yields with short-to-medium maturities decrease as a result of the “fly-to-safety" effect when the chengtou risk increases. Meanwhile, the dynamics of chengtou bond spreads reflect the market-oriented risk pricing by investors on credit and liquidity risks under limitations of the government implicit guarantee. Under this condition, it is the right timing to reasonably standardize and institutionalize the local government bond market with transparent market mechanism.

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the effects of Computer-based Trad-ing (CBT) on Treasury bond expected returns. We document a strong relationship between bond expected returns and the overall intensity at which CBT takes place in the Treasury market. Investing in bonds with the largest beta to the aggregate CBT intensity and shorting those with the smallest generates large and significant returns. Those returns are not due to compensation for facing conventional sources of risk or to transaction costs. Our results are consistent with capital-flow based explanations implied by asset pricing models with institutional investors.

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.

It is well documented that bond excess returns are time-varying and that they can be explained by predetermined risk factors. This paper builds a theoretical model to forecast excess returns on treasury bonds in the context of China’s unique monetary system. Empirical evidence shows that bond excess returns in China are highly predictable when compared to those in developed markets. Further investigation suggests that the predicted components are primarily driven by the inflexible term structures of official interest rates set by China’s central bank.

This paper investigates the impact of macro variables on the volatility of bond returns. Using the principal components analysis, we extract the “real” and “money” factors from the real activities and monetary variables, respectively. Following Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel, and Xu (2001), we decompose the bond volatility into market-level volatility and maturity volatility. Using the daily returns on the 1-, 5-, 10- and 30-year US treasury bonds, we find that the macro factors significantly affect the bond volatility. In particular, the “real” factor affects the bond volatility of all maturities while the monetary variables are significantly related to the volatility of short-term bonds and weakly related to the volatility of medium-term bonds.

The US dollar has been volatile and falling again and again in recent decades as well as recent years, and for many observers, it is going to be broken sooner or later. The central importance of the dollar is due to the fact that it is not just a currency for the US. Over half of all dollar bills in circulation are held outside of the US borders, and almost half of the US Treasury bonds are held as reserves by foreign central banks. The US dollar is supposed to be the anchor that stabilizes the global currency market. Instead, today it is a major source of instability. In the back ground, the US fiscal deficits have been running high again under Bush administration, once up to almost 3% of US GDP. And current account deficit is set to about 7% in 2005 and more volatility is widely expected. The situation is very challenging for the central banks of Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore which collectively hold about US$2.8 trillion worth of US Treasury bonds as part of their reserves. The moment that they reduce their purchases, the value of the dollar slips. Yet, the more they buy, the more they are exposed to a potential free fall of the US dollar. China has been blamed, not only by US congressmen who are understandably not very familiar with either the complicated currency issues or the domestic politics in any other country, but also many economists or business strategists. It was said that it was all because RMB did not reevaluate, as the source of this "global imbalance" and currency instability. How much revaluation of RMB would remove the US deficits of $700 billions, or at least the US-China trade deficits $200 billions (including Hong Kong)? 500% or 1000%? Of cause no body asked for that kind of magnitude now. Normally smart people say 30-50%, with the unsaid intention to blame-then-suggest again another 30-50% after some initial moves, then the third, the fourth. This seems not really new phenomena at all. It has been all so familiar before and since the Nixon shock in early 70s', and in 80s' when there was the Plaza Accord. The convenient targets to blame were the gold standard, the Dutch Mark, the Japanese Yen. Now it is turn for Chinese reminbi. So the question is what are the real causes of the global imbalance and currency instability? In this short paper, we first take a look at what is really going on with the Chinese economy and trade balance, and then try to identify sources of the current imbalance , and then, as a concluding remark, think again the possibilities to reform the global currency system.