IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/usg/sfwpfi/201909.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Safe Asset Carry Trade

Author

Listed:
  • Benedikt Ballensiefen
  • Angelo Ranaldo

Abstract

We provide an asset pricing analysis of one of the main categories of near-money or safe assets, the repurchase agreement (repo). Heterogeneity in repo rates allows for a remunerative carry trade. The return on this carry trade, our carry factor, together with a market factor explain the temporal and cross-sectional variation in repo rates within a no-arbitrage framework: While the market factor determines the level of short-term interest rates, the carry factor accounts for the cross-sectional dispersion. Consistent with the safe asset literature, the carry factor reflects heterogeneity in convenience premia and is explained by the safety premium, the liquidity premium, and the opportunity cost of holding money.

Suggested Citation

  • Benedikt Ballensiefen & Angelo Ranaldo, 2019. "Safe Asset Carry Trade," Working Papers on Finance 1909, University of St. Gallen, School of Finance, revised Oct 2019.
    • Handle: RePEc:usg:sfwpfi:2019:09
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ux-tauri.unisg.ch/RePEc/usg/sfwpfi/WPF-1909.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Arvind Krishnamurthy & Stefan Nagel & Dmitry Orlov, 2014. "Sizing Up Repo," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(6), pages 2381-2417, December.
    2. Della Corte, Pasquale & Sarno, Lucio & Thornton, Daniel L., 2008. "The expectation hypothesis of the term structure of very short-term rates: Statistical tests and economic value," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(1), pages 158-174, July.
    3. Boissel, Charles & Derrien, François & Ors, Evren & Thesmar, David, 2017. "Systemic risk in clearing houses: Evidence from the European repo market," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 125(3), pages 511-536.
    4. Bank for International Settlements, 2017. "Repo market functioning," CGFS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 59, december.
    5. Arvind Krishnamurthy & Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, 2012. "The Aggregate Demand for Treasury Debt," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(2), pages 233-267.
    6. Marcin Kacperczyk & Christophe Pérignon & Guillaume Vuillemey, 2021. "The Private Production of Safe Assets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(2), pages 495-535, April.
    7. Hansen, Lars Peter, 1982. "Large Sample Properties of Generalized Method of Moments Estimators," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(4), pages 1029-1054, July.
    8. Itamar Drechsler & Alexi Savov & Philipp Schnabl, 2018. "A Model of Monetary Policy and Risk Premia," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 73(1), pages 317-373, February.
    9. Corradin, Stefano & Maddaloni, Angela, 2020. "The importance of being special: Repo markets during the crisis," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 137(2), pages 392-429.
    10. Jeremy C. Stein, 2012. "Monetary Policy as Financial Stability Regulation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 127(1), pages 57-95.
    11. Jean-Sébastien Fontaine & René Garcia, 2012. "Bond Liquidity Premia," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 25(4), pages 1207-1254.
    12. Krishnamurthy, Arvind & Vissing-Jorgensen, Annette, 2015. "The impact of Treasury supply on financial sector lending and stability," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(3), pages 571-600.
    13. Alan Moreira & Alexi Savov, 2017. "The Macroeconomics of Shadow Banking," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 72(6), pages 2381-2432, December.
    14. Bengt Holmstrom & Jean Tirole, 1998. "Private and Public Supply of Liquidity," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 106(1), pages 1-40, February.
    15. Ricardo J Caballero & Emmanuel Farhi, 2018. "The Safety Trap," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(1), pages 223-274.
    16. Tri Vi Dang & Gary Gorton & Bengt Holmström & Guillermo Ordoñez, 2017. "Banks as Secret Keepers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(4), pages 1005-1029, April.
    17. Ricardo J. Caballero & Emmanuel Farhi & Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, 2016. "Safe Asset Scarcity and Aggregate Demand," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(5), pages 513-518, May.
    18. Robin Greenwood & Dimitri Vayanos, 2014. "Bond Supply and Excess Bond Returns," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 27(3), pages 663-713.
    19. D’Amico, Stefania & Fan, Roger & Kitsul, Yuriy, 2018. "The Scarcity Value of Treasury Collateral: Repo-Market Effects of Security-Specific Supply and Demand Factors," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 53(5), pages 2103-2129, October.
    20. Ricardo J. Caballero & Arvind Krishnamurthy, 2009. "Global Imbalances and Financial Fragility," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(2), pages 584-588, May.
    21. Zhengyang Jiang & Arvind Krishnamurthy & Hanno Lustig, 2021. "Foreign Safe Asset Demand and the Dollar Exchange Rate," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(3), pages 1049-1089, June.
    22. Jordan, Bradford D & Jordan, Susan D, 1997. "Special Repo Rates: An Empirical Analysis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(5), pages 2051-2072, December.
    23. Hanno Lustig & Nikolai Roussanov & Adrien Verdelhan, 2011. "Common Risk Factors in Currency Markets," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 24(11), pages 3731-3777.
    24. Zhiguo He & Arvind Krishnamurthy & Konstantin Milbradt, 2019. "A Model of Safe Asset Determination," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 109(4), pages 1230-1262, April.
    25. Nicolae Gârleanu & Lasse Heje Pedersen, 2011. "Margin-based Asset Pricing and Deviations from the Law of One Price," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 24(6), pages 1980-2022.
    26. Wenxin Du & Alexander Tepper & Adrien Verdelhan, 2018. "Deviations from Covered Interest Rate Parity," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 73(3), pages 915-957, June.
    27. Buraschi, Andrea & Menini, Davide, 2002. "Liquidity risk and specialness," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 243-284, May.
    28. Adam Copeland & Antoine Martin & Michael Walker, 2014. "Repo Runs: Evidence from the Tri-Party Repo Market," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(6), pages 2343-2380, December.
    29. Ranaldo, Angelo & Schaffner, Patrick & Vasios, Michalis, 2021. "Regulatory effects on short-term interest rates," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 750-770.
    30. Infante, Sebastian, 2020. "Private money creation with safe assets and term premia," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(3), pages 828-856.
    31. Francis A. Longstaff, 2004. "The Flight-to-Liquidity Premium in U.S. Treasury Bond Prices," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 77(3), pages 511-526, July.
    32. Gorton, Gary & Metrick, Andrew, 2012. "Securitized banking and the run on repo," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(3), pages 425-451.
    33. Stefan Nagel, 2016. "The Liquidity Premium of Near-Money Assets," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(4), pages 1927-1971.
    34. Gary Gorton, 2017. "The History and Economics of Safe Assets," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 9(1), pages 547-586, September.
    35. Robin Greenwood & Samuel G. Hanson & Jeremy C. Stein, 2015. "A Comparative-Advantage Approach to Government Debt Maturity," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(4), pages 1683-1722, August.
    36. Ricardo J. Caballero & Emmanuel Farhi & Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, 2017. "The Safe Assets Shortage Conundrum," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 31(3), pages 29-46, Summer.
    37. Fama, Eugene F. & French, Kenneth R., 1993. "Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 3-56, February.
    38. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    39. Duffie, Darrell, 1996. "Special Repo Rates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(2), pages 493-526, June.
    40. Loriano Mancini & Angelo Ranaldo & Jan Wrampelmeyer, 2016. "The Euro Interbank Repo Market," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 29(7), pages 1747-1779.
    41. Krishnamurthy, Arvind, 2002. "The bond/old-bond spread," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2-3), pages 463-506.
    42. Du, Wenxin & Im, Joanne & Schreger, Jesse, 2018. "The U.S. Treasury Premium," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 167-181.
    43. Matthias Fleckenstein & Francis A. Longstaff & Hanno Lustig, 2014. "The TIPS-Treasury Bond Puzzle," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(5), pages 2151-2197, October.
    44. Gorton, Gary & Pennacchi, George, 1990. "Financial Intermediaries and Liquidity Creation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 45(1), pages 49-71, March.
    45. Fama, Eugene F & MacBeth, James D, 1973. "Risk, Return, and Equilibrium: Empirical Tests," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 607-636, May-June.
    46. Nelson, Charles R & Siegel, Andrew F, 1987. "Parsimonious Modeling of Yield Curves," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 60(4), pages 473-489, October.
    47. Adi Sunderam, 2015. "Money Creation and the Shadow Banking System," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 28(4), pages 939-977.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ranaldo, Angelo & Schaffner, Patrick & Vasios, Michalis, 2021. "Regulatory effects on short-term interest rates," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 750-770.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marcin Kacperczyk & Christophe Pérignon & Guillaume Vuillemey, 2021. "The Private Production of Safe Assets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(2), pages 495-535, April.
    2. He, Zhiguo & Nagel, Stefan & Song, Zhaogang, 2022. "Treasury inconvenience yields during the COVID-19 crisis," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(1), pages 57-79.
    3. Ranaldo, Angelo & Schaffner, Patrick & Vasios, Michalis, 2021. "Regulatory effects on short-term interest rates," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 750-770.
    4. Thomas M. Eisenbach & Gregory Phelan, 2022. "Fragility of Safe Asset Markets," Staff Reports 1026, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    5. Jappelli, Ruggero & Pelizzon, Loriana & Subrahmanyam, Marti G., 2023. "Quantitative easing, the repo market, and the term structure of interest rates," SAFE Working Paper Series 395, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    6. Corradin, Stefano & Maddaloni, Angela, 2020. "The importance of being special: Repo markets during the crisis," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 137(2), pages 392-429.
    7. Golec, Pascal & Perotti, Enrico, 2017. "Safe assets: a review," Working Paper Series 2035, European Central Bank.
    8. Jackson, Timothy & Pennacchi, George, 2021. "How should governments create liquidity?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 281-295.
    9. Del Negro, Marco & Giannone, Domenico & Giannoni, Marc P. & Tambalotti, Andrea, 2019. "Global trends in interest rates," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 248-262.
    10. Lewis, Kurt F. & Longstaff, Francis A. & Petrasek, Lubomir, 2021. "Asset mispricing," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(3), pages 981-1006.
    11. Corradin, Stefano & Heider, Florian & Hoerova, Marie, 2017. "On collateral: implications for financial stability and monetary policy," Working Paper Series 2107, European Central Bank.
    12. Infante, Sebastian, 2020. "Private money creation with safe assets and term premia," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(3), pages 828-856.
    13. Fleckenstein, Matthias & Longstaff, Francis A., 2020. "The US Treasury floating rate note puzzle: Is there a premium for mark-to-market stability?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 137(3), pages 637-658.
    14. Angelo Ranaldo & Benedikt Ballensiefen & Hannah Winterberg, 2020. "Monetary policy disconnect," Working Papers on Finance 2003, University of St. Gallen, School of Finance.
    15. Sergey Chernenko & Adi Sunderam, 2016. "Liquidity Transformation in Asset Management: Evidence from the Cash Holdings of Mutual Funds," NBER Working Papers 22391, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Gerba, Eddie & Katsoulis, Petros, 2021. "The repo market under Basel III," Bank of England working papers 954, Bank of England.
    17. Xiong, Qizhou, 2018. "The liquidity premium of safe assets: The role of government debt supply," IWH Discussion Papers 11/2017, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH), revised 2018.
    18. William Arrata & Benoit Nguyen & Imene Rahmouni-Rousseau & Miklos Vari, 2018. "The Scarcity Effect of Quantitative Easing on Repo Rates: Evidence from the Euro Area," IMF Working Papers 2018/258, International Monetary Fund.
    19. Chase P. Ross, 2022. "The Collateral Premium and Levered Safe-Asset Production," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2022-046, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    20. Toni Ahnert & Enrico Perotti, 2018. "Seeking Safety," Staff Working Papers 18-41, Bank of Canada.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Safe Asset; Near-Money Asset; Repo; Carry Trade; Asset Pricing; Short-Term Interest Rates; Convenience Premium;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E40 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - General
    • E41 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Demand for Money
    • G00 - Financial Economics - - General - - - General
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G10 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:usg:sfwpfi:2019:09. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cfisgch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.