The global market for inflation-indexed securities has ballooned in recent years, and this trend is set to continue. This book examines the rationale behind issuance and investment decisions, and details the issues facing anyone who designs indexed securities, illustrating them wherever possible with actual examples from the international capital markets. In particular, an extensive review of indexed debt markets throughout the world is provided - including for the first time, a comprehensive and consistent set of cash flow and price-yield equations for the instruments already in existence in the major bond markets - forming an important reference for those already experienced in the field, as well as practitioners and academics approaching the subject for the first time. The book also provides unique insight into the development of inflation-indexed derivative products, and the analytical tools required to value such instruments.

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

A number of industrialized countries have recently offered inflation-indexed bonds. Some members of another group of countries that had earlier adopted more comprehensive indexation in response to high inflation have taken steps to reduce the scope of indexation in their economies. This paper surveys debt management, monetary policy, and welfare arguments on the use of inflation-indexed bonds, and relates these to the experiences of various issuers. The paper also considers some important design features of indexed bonds.

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

Each new chapter of the Second Edition covers an aspect of the fixed income market that has become relevant to investors but is not covered at an advanced level in existing textbooks. This is material that is pertinent to the investment decisions but is not freely available to those not originating the products. Professor Choudhry's method is to place ideas into contexts in order to keep them from becoming too theoretical. While the level of mathematical sophistication is both high and specialized, he includes a brief introduction to the key mathematical concepts. This is a book on the financial markets, not mathematics, and he provides few derivations and fewer proofs. He draws on both his personal experience as well as his own research to bring together subjects of practical importance to bond market investors and analysts. - Presents practitioner-level theories and applications, never available in textbooks - Focuses on financial markets, not mathematics - Covers relative value investing, returns analysis, and risk estimation

A comprehensive guide to the current theories and methodologies intrinsic to fixed-income securities Written by well-known experts from a cross section of academia and finance, Handbook of Fixed-Income Securities features a compilation of the most up-to-date fixed-income securities techniques and methods. The book presents crucial topics of fixed income in an accessible and logical format. Emphasizing empirical research and real-life applications, the book explores a wide range of topics from the risk and return of fixed-income investments, to the impact of monetary policy on interest rates, to the post-crisis new regulatory landscape. Well organized to cover critical topics in fixed income, Handbook of Fixed-Income Securities is divided into eight main sections that feature: • An introduction to fixed-income markets such as Treasury bonds, inflation-protected securities, money markets, mortgage-backed securities, and the basic analytics that characterize them • Monetary policy and fixed-income markets, which highlight the recent empirical evidence on the central banks’ influence on interest rates, including the recent quantitative easing experiments • Interest rate risk measurement and management with a special focus on the most recent techniques and methodologies for asset-liability management under regulatory constraints • The predictability of bond returns with a critical discussion of the empirical evidence on time-varying bond risk premia, both in the United States and abroad, and their sources, such as liquidity and volatility • Advanced topics, with a focus on the most recent research on term structure models and econometrics, the dynamics of bond illiquidity, and the puzzling dynamics of stocks and bonds • Derivatives markets, including a detailed discussion of the new regulatory landscape after the financial crisis and an introduction to no-arbitrage derivatives pricing • Further topics on derivatives pricing that cover modern valuation techniques, such as Monte Carlo simulations, volatility surfaces, and no-arbitrage pricing with regulatory constraints • Corporate and sovereign bonds with a detailed discussion of the tools required to analyze default risk, the relevant empirical evidence, and a special focus on the recent sovereign crises A complete reference for practitioners in the fields of finance, business, applied statistics, econometrics, and engineering, Handbook of Fixed-Income Securities is also a useful supplementary textbook for graduate and MBA-level courses on fixed-income securities, risk management, volatility, bonds, derivatives, and financial markets. Pietro Veronesi, PhD, is Roman Family Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he teaches Masters and PhD-level courses in fixed income, risk management, and asset pricing. Published in leading academic journals and honored by numerous awards, his research focuses on stock and bond valuation, return predictability, bubbles and crashes, and the relation between asset prices and government policies.

The great majority of working Americans are unprepared to face the difficult task of planning for retirement. In fact, the personal savings rate has been holding steady at zero for several years, down from 8 percent in the mid-1980s. Overcoming the Saving Slump explores the many challenges facing workers in the transition from a traditional defined benefit pension system to one that requires more individual responsibility, analyzing the considerable impediments to saving and evaluating financial literacy programs devised by employers and the government. Mapping the changing landscape of pensions and the rise of defined contribution plans, Annamaria Lusardi and others investigate new methods for stimulating saving and promoting financial education drawing on the experience of the United States as well as countries that have privatized their welfare systems, including Sweden and Chile. This timely volume pinpoints where human resources departments, the financial industry, and government officials have succeeded—or failed—in bridging the way to a new retirement system. As the workforce ages and more pensions disappear each second, Lusardi’s findings will be invaluable for economists and anyone facing retirement.