Yield-chasing and risk-taking behaviors in the government bond market have become increasingly pronounced amidst monetary policy adjustments and rising economic uncertainty. We construct a theoretical model of fund manager portfolio allocation to analyze the duration channel underlying these behaviors and empirically test this mechanism using data on Chinese bond funds. The results show that: (1) When liquidity tightens following open market operations (OMO), bond fund returns decline, accompanied by a distinct shift in risk contribution. (2) During liquidity easing, funds engage in yield chasing by extending portfolio duration to capture returns through increased interest rate risk exposure. (3) High economic uncertainty amplifies yield-chasing behavior while attenuating the risk conversion phenomenon. (4) Portfolio analysis indicates that long-short strategies based on duration management generate significant risk-adjusted returns but fail to deliver excess returns. These findings offer theoretical insights and practical implications for managing and mitigating interest rate risk in the government bond market.

How do Held-to-Maturity (HTM) securities that limit the impacts of banks’ unrealized capital loss on the regulatory capital measures affect banks’ exposure to deposit run risks when policy rates increase? And how should regulators design policies on classifying securities as HTM jointly with bank capital regulation? To answer these questions, we develop a model of bank runs in which banks classify long-term assets as HTM or Asset-for-Sale (AFS). Banks trade off the current cost of issuing equity to meet the capital requirement when the interest rate increases against increasing future run risks when the interest rate increases further in the future. When banks underestimate interest rate risks or have limited liability to depositors in the event of default, capping held-to-maturity long-term assets and mandating more equity capital issuance may reduce the run risks of moderately capitalized banks. Using bank-quarter-level data from Call Reports, we provide empirical support for the model’s testable implications.

Interest rate liberalization in China intensifies the exposure of commercial banks' interest rate risks and further increases the difficulty for commercial banks to effectively control interest rate risks, thus putting forward higher requirements for the normal operation and management of commercial banks. With the development of China's financial derivatives market, banking institutions begin to use basic interest rate derivatives to hedge interest rate risks. It is very important to give full play to the maturity transformation Function of commercial banks to enhance the ability of financial services to the real economy. Based on the semi annual unbalanced panel data of 37 listed banks in A-share stock markets from 2006 to 2020, this paper empirically tests the impact of the use of off balance sheet interest rate derivatives on the Maturity Transformation Function of banks in the case of interest rate fluctuations. The empirical results show that: (1) the use of interest rate derivatives helps to weaken the negative impact of interest rate fluctuations on the Maturity Transformation Function of banks. (2) The analysis of the mechanism shows that the use of interest rate derivatives improves the stability of the bank's asset side term structure and liability side term structure, so as to support the effective play of the bank's financial intermediary role. (3) Further analysis shows that the of interest rate derivatives significantly reduces the volatility of bank earnings. This study makes it clear that the use of interest rate derivatives has a positive impact on the commercial banks, which provides evidence for the further development of interest rate derivatives market in China.

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.

Much recent work has documented evidence for predictability of asset returns.We show how such predictability can affect the portfolio choice of long-lived investors who value wealth not for its own sake but for the consumption their wealth can support.We develop an approximate solution method for the optimal consumption and portfolio choice problem of an infinitely-lived investor with Epstein-Zin utility who faces a set of asset returns described by a vector autoregression in returns and state variables.Empirical estimates in long-run annual and postwar quarterly US data suggest that the predictability of stock returns greatly inceases the optimal demand for stocks.The role of nominal bonds in long-term portfolios depends on the importance of real interest rate risk relative to other sources of risk.We extend the analysis to consider long-term inflation-indexed bonds and find that these bonds greatly increase the utility of conservative investors,who should hold large positions when they are available.