This paper employs an approximation that makes a nonlinear term structure model extremely tractable for analysis of an economy operating near the zero lower bound for interest rates. We show that such a model offers an excellent description of the data compared to the benchmark model and can be used to summarize the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policy. Our estimates imply that the efforts by the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy since July 2009 succeeded in making the unemployment rate in December 2013 1% lower, which is 0.13% more compared to the historical behavior of the Fed.JEL codes: E43, E44, E52, E58

This paper reviews alternative options for monetary policy when the short-term interest rate is at the zero lower bound and develops new empirical estimates of the effects of the maturity structure of publicly held debt on the term structure of interest rates.We use a model of risk-averse arbitrageurs to develop measures of how the maturity structure of debt held by the public might affect the pricing of level, slope and curvature term-structure risk. We find these Treasury factors historically were quite helpful for predicting both yields and excess returns over 1990-2007. The historical correlations are consistent with the claim that if in December of 2006, the Fed were to have sold off all its Treasury holdings of less than one-year maturity (about $400 billion) and use the proceeds to retire Treasury debt from the long end, this might have resulted in a 14-basis-point drop in the 10-year rate and an 11-basis-point increase in the 6-month rate. We also develop a description of how the dynamic behavior of the term structure of interest rates changed after hitting the zero lower bound in 2009. Our estimates imply that at the zero lower bound, such a maturity swap would have the same effects as buying $400 billion in long-term maturities outright with newly created reserves, and could reduce the 10-year rate by 13 basis points without raising short-term yields.2

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If commercial producers or financial investors use futures contracts to hedge against commodity price risk, the arbitrageurs who take the other side of the contracts may receive compensation for their assumption of nondiversifiable risk in the form of positive expected returns from their positions. We show that this interaction can produce an affine factor structure to commodity futures prices, and develop new algorithms for estimation of such models using unbalanced data sets in which the duration of observed contracts changes with each observation. We document significant changes in oil futures risk premia since 2005, with the compensation to the long position smaller on average in more recent data. This observation is consistent with the claim that index-fund investing has become more important relative to commerical hedging in determining the structure of crude oil futures risk premia over time.

The affine dynamic term structure model (DTSM) is the canonical empirical finance representation of the yield curve. However, the possibility that DTSM estimates may be distorted by small-sample bias has been largely ignored. We show that conventional estimates of DTSM coefficients are indeed severely biased, and this bias results in misleading estimates of expected future short-term interest rates and of long-maturity term premia.We provide a variety of bias-corrected estimates of affine DTSMs, both for maximallyflexible and over-identified specifications. Our estimates imply short rate expectations and term premia that are more plausible from a macro-finance perspective.