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.

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.

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.

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.

We develop a nonparametric specification test for continuous-time models using the transition density. Using a data transform and correcting for boundary bias of kernel estimators, our test is robust to serial dependence in data and provides excellent finite sample performance. Besides univariate diffusion models, our test is applicable to a wide variety of continuous-time and discretetime dynamic models, including time-inhomogeneous diffusion, GARCH, stochastic volatility, regimeswitching,jump-diffusion, and multivariate diffusion models. A class of separate inference procedures is also proposed to help gauge possible sources of model misspecification. We strongly reject a variety of univariate diffusion models for daily Eurodollar spot rates and some popular multivariate affine term structure models for monthly U.S. Treasury yields.