An Extended Macro-Finance Model with Financial Factors

This paper extends the benchmark Macro-Finance model by introducing, next to the standard macroeconomic factors, additional liquidity-related and return forecasting factors. Liquidity factors are obtained from a decomposition of the TED spread while the return-forecasting (risk premium) factor is extracted by imposing asingle factor structure on excess holding returns. The modelis estimated on US data using MCMC techniques. Two findings stand out. First, the model outperforms Macro-Finance benchmark models in fitting the yield curve. Second, financial shocks, either in the form of liquidity or risk premium shocks, have a statistically and economically significant impact on the yield curve.