Topic: Macro Factors and Volatility of Treasury Bond Returns
Presenter：LEI LU，Assistant Professor of Finance, Shanghai University of Finance & Economics
Time: October 9, 2009（Friday）3:00—4:30PM
Venue: Room 501, Jiageng Bld2
Chair： Zhe Shen,assistant professor in finance, IFAS
Abstract：
This paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic variables on the volatility of Treasury bond returns. By using principal components analysis, we extract the “real” and “monetary” macro factors from the real activies and monetary variables, respectively. We find that these macro factors have a significant impact on the volatility of Treasury bond returns. In particular, we find that the real activities affect the return volatility across all maturities, while the monetary variables are significantly related to the volatility of short- and medium-term bonds only. The implication of these findings is that the policy makers can employ monetary policy to stabilize the fluctuation of short- and medium-term bonds, but need to take the real activities into account when stabilizing the fluctuation of long-term bonds.
Presenter Introduction：
Dr. Lu Lei is assistant professor of finance at Shanghai University of Finance & Economics. Dr. Lu got bachelor and master degree in management from Zhengzhou University and Tianjin University respectively. He got PhD in Finance from McGill University. His research interests include asset pricing (theoretical and empirical), macro finance, fixed income and Chinese financial markets.
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