At the turn of the century, US and euro area long-term bond yields experienced a remarkable decline and remained at historically low levels despite rising short-term rates (the so called "conundrum"). Estimating macro-finance VARs and no-arbitrage term structure models, many researchers find that the decline in long-term rates was primarily driven by an unprecedented reduction in risk premia. I show that this result might be an artefact of the class of models employed to study the phenomenon.
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Volume (Year): 18 (2009) Issue (Month): 4 (October) Pages: 163-171 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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David K. Backus & Jonathan H. Wright, 2007.
"Cracking the Conundrum,"
Working Papers
07-22, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
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David K. Backus & Jonathan H. Wright, 2007.
"Cracking the Conundrum,"
NBER Working Papers
13419, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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