The Tail that Keeps the Riskless Rate Low

Julian Kozlowski, Laura Veldkamp and Venky Venkateswaran

No 24362, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Riskless interest rates fell in the wake of the financial crisis and have remained low. We explore a simple explanation: This recession was perceived as an extremely unlikely event before 2007. Observing such an episode led all agents to re-assess macro risk, in particular, the probability of tail events. Since changes in beliefs endure long after the event itself has passed, perceived tail risk remains high, generates a demand for riskless, liquid assets, and continues to depress the riskless rate. We embed this mechanism in a simple production economy with liquidity constraints and use observable macro data, along with standard econometric tools, to discipline beliefs about the distribution of aggregate shocks. When agents observe an extreme, adverse realization, they re-estimate the distribution and attach a higher probability to such events recurring. As a result, even transitory shocks have persistent effects because, once observed, the shock stays forever in the agents' data set. We show that our belief revision mechanism can help explain the persistent nature of the fall in the risk-free rates.

JEL-codes: E43 E44 G01 G14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
Note: AP EFG IFM ME
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published as The Tail That Keeps the Riskless Rate Low , Julian Kozlowski, Laura Veldkamp, Venky Venkateswaran. in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2018, volume 33 , Eichenbaum and Parker. 2019

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24362.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: The Tail That Keeps the Riskless Rate Low (2018)
Working Paper: The Tail that Keeps the Riskless Rate Low (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24362

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24362

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().