Information in (and not in) Treasury Options

This paper studies the impact of variance risk in the Treasury market on both term premia and the shape of the yield curve. Under minimal assumptions shared by standard structural and reduced-form asset pricing models, I show that an observable proxy of variance risk in the Treasury market can be constructed via a portfolio of Treasury options. The observable variance risk has the ability to explain the time variation in term premia, but is largely unrelated to the shape of the yield curve. Using the observable variance risk, I also propose a new representation of no-arbitrage term structure models. All the pricing factors in the model are observable, tradable, and hence economically interpretable. The representation can also accommodate both unspanned macro risks and unspanned stochastic volatility in the term structure literature.