Equity returns follow a pronounced V-shape pattern around the onset of recessions. They sharply drop into negative territory just before business cycle peaks and then strongly recover as the recession unfolds. Recessions are typically preceded by a flat yield curve. Probit models relying on the term spread as a predictor therefore time the beginning of recessions well. We show that model-implied recession probabilities based on the term spread strongly improve equity premium prediction in- and out- of-sample and outperform several benchmark predictors. Correcting for a structural break in the mean of the term spread in 1982 further strengthens the forecast performance.
We document a pecking order of transaction costs in the interdealer market for German sovereign bonds, where three trading protocols coexist. Dealers can trade over-the-counter, either bilaterally or via brokers, as well as on an exchange. Trading on the exchange is more expensive than OTC, and broker-intermediated are more costly than bilateral OTC trades. The existence of an OTC discount isdifficult to square with theories centred around search-and-bargaining frictions, but is in line with models of hybrid markets based on information frictions. Consistently, we show that dealers' information impacts their choice of trading protocol and that the pecking order of transaction costs is aligned with the informational content of order flows across protocols. Search-and-bargaining as well as information proxies explain differences in OTC discount within protocols. A realistic description ofhybrid markets thus requires both types of frictions.
We introduce quantile and moment impulse response functions for structural quantile vector autoregressive models. We use them to study how climate-related natural disasters affect the predictive distribution of output growth and inflation. Disasters strongly shift the forecast distribution, particularly in the tails. They result in an initial sharp increase of the downside risk for growth, followed by a temporary rebound. Upside risk to inflation increases markedly for a few months and then subsides. As a result, natural disasters have a persistent impactor in the conditional variance and skewness of macroeconomic aggregates, which standard linear models estimating conditional mean dynamics fail to match. We perform a scenario analysis to evaluate the hypothetical effects of more frequent large disasters on the macroeconomy due to increased atmospheric carbon concentration. Our results indicate a substantially higher conditional volatility of growth and inflation, as well as increased upside risk to inflation, particularly in a scenario where only currently pledged climate policies are implemented.
We develop a theory of low-frequency movements in inflation expectations, and use it to interpret joint dynamics of inflation and inflation expectations for the United States and other countries over the postwar period. In our theory, long-run inflation expectations are endogenous. They are driven by short-run inflation surprises, in a way that depends on recent forecasting performance and monetary policy. This distinguishes our theory from common explanations of low-frequency properties of inflation. The model, estimated using only inflation and short-term forecasts from professional surveys, accurately predicts observed measures of long-term inflation expectations and identifies episodes of unanchored expectations.
We identify a yield news shock as an innovation that does not move Treasury yields contemporaneously but explains a maximum share of their future variation. Yields do not immediately respond to the news shock as the initial reaction of term premiums and expected short rates offset each other. While the impact on term premiums fades quickly, expected short rates and thus yields decline persistently. As a result, the shock explains a staggering 50% of Treasury yield variation several years out. A positive yield news shock is associated with a coincident sharp increase in stock and bond market volatility, a contemporaneous response of leading economic indicators, and is followed by a persistent decline of real activity and inflation which is accommodated by the Federal Reserve. Identified shocks to realized stock market volatility and business cycle news imply similar impulse responses and together capture the bulk of variation of the yield news shock.
We identify a yield news shock as an innovation that does not move Treasury yields contemporaneously but explains a maximum share of their future variation. Yields do not immediately respond to the news shock as the initial reaction of term premiums and expected short rates offset each other. While the impact on term premiums fades quickly, expected short rates and thus yields decline persistently. As a result, the shock explains a staggering 50% of Treasury yield variation several years out. A positive yield news shock is associated with a coincident sharp increase in stock and bond market volatility, a contemporaneous response of leading economic indicators, and is followed by a persistent decline of real activity and inflation which is accommodated by the Federal Reserve. Identified shocks to realized stock market volatility and business cycle news imply similar impulse responses and together capture the bulk of variation of the yield news shock.
This note discusses the article “Monetary Policy Communication, Policy Slope, and the Stock Market”by Andreas Neuhierl and Michael Weber. The authors document that the slope of the fed funds futures curve predicts stock returns one week ahead and is corre- lated with the tone of Fed Board member speeches over the period 1994–2007. We show that this return predictability is restricted to the subsample from 1999 to 2001, with no evidence of predictability outside of this period. We further point out some issues with the proposed measure of monetary policy tone and show that the positive correlation be- tween tone and the fed funds futures slope is driven by two speeches that, when analyzed in detail, do not appear particularly hawkish.
A previous literature has documented that bond returns are predicted by macroeconomic information not contained in yields contemporaneously. That literature has mostly relied on final revised, rather than real time macroeconomic data. We show that the use of real time data substantially reduces the predictive power of macro variables for future bond returns as well as the implied countercyclicality of term premiums. We discuss potential interpretations of our results.
Inflation-indexed and nominal yield curves capture investors' expectations of real shortrates and inflation as well as their required compensation for bearing liquidity, inflation,and real interest rate risk.We estimate an affine term structure model that allows us todecompose real and nominal bond yields into these components and use the model tostudy the transmission of monetary policy.The model decompositions imply that theFederal Reserve's announcements of LSAPs lowered yields primarily by reducing real termpremia. Changes in real term premia also account for the strong response oflong-termreal forward rates to federal funds rate surprises.
We document a novel set of facts about disagreement among professional forecasters:(1) forecasters disagree at all horizons, including the long run;(2) the term structure ofdisagreement is downward sloping for real output growth, relatively flat for inflation, andupward sloping for the federal funds rate; (3) disagreement is time varying at all horizons.We propose a generalized model of imperfect information that can jointly explain thesefacts. We further use the term structure of disagreement to show that the monetary policyrule perceived by professional forecasters features a high degree of interest-ratesmoothing and time variation in the intercept.
We reassess the in- and out-of-sample predictability of US recessions at horizons of three months to two years ahead for a large number of previously proposed leading indicator variables, using the Treasury term spread as a benchmark. We estimate both univariate and multivariate probit models, and evaluate the relative model performance based on the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. At the three- and six-month- ahead horizons, various alternative predictor variables increase the accuracy of recession forecasts significantly relative to the term spread, with the annual return on the S&P500 index providing the strongest improvement. While the Treasury term spread is more difficult to outperform systematically at longer horizons, manufacturers’ new orders of capital goods and balances in Broker-Dealer margin accounts increase the precision of recession predictions significantly at horizons of more than one year.
We propose regression-based estimators for beta representations of dynamic asset pricing models with an affine pricing kernel specification. We allow for state variables that are cross-sectional pricing factors, forecasting variables for the price of risk, and factors that are both. The estimators explicitly allow for time-varying prices of risk, time-varying betas, and serially dependent pricing factors. Our approach nests the Fama-MacBeth two- pass estimator as a special case. We provide asymptotic multistage standard errors necessary to conduct inference for asset pricing tests. We illustrate our new estimators in an application to the joint pricing of stocks and bonds. The application features strongly time-varying, highly significant prices of risk that are found to be quantitatively more important than time-varying betas in reducing pricing errors.
The Pre-FOMC Announcement Drift (with David Lucca), Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports No. 512, July 2013, Journal of Finance, Vol. 70 No. 1, January 2015, winner of the Amundi Smith Breeden First Prize for the best capital markets paper published in the Journal of Finance in 2015
We document large average excess returns on U.S. equities in anticipation of monetary policy decisions made at scheduled meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in the past few decades. These pre-FOMC returns have increased over time and account for sizable fractions of total annual realized stock returns. While other major international equity indices experienced similar pre-FOMC returns, we find no such effect in U.S. Treasury securities and money market futures. Other major U.S. macroeconomic news announcements also do not give rise to preannouncement excess equity returns. We discuss challenges in explaining these returns with standard asset pricing theory
This paper uses multilevel factor models to characterize within and between-block variations as well as idiosyncratic noise in large dynamic panels. Block-level shocks are distinguished from genuinely common shocks, and the estimated block-level factors are easy to interprete. The framework achieves dimension reduction and yet explicitly allows for heterogeneity between blocks. The model is estimated using an MCMC algorithm that takes into account the hierarchical structure of the factors. The importance of block-level variations is illustrated in a four-level model estimated on a panel of 445 series related to different categories of real activity in the United States.
We show how to price the time series and cross-section of the term structure of interest rates using a three-step linear regression approach. Our method allows computationally fast estimation of term structure models with a large number of pricing factors.We present specification tests favoring a model using five principal components of yields as factors. We demonstrate that this model outperforms the Cochrane and Piazzesi (2008) four-factor specification in out-of-sample exercises but generates similar in-sample term premium dynamics.Our regression approach can also incorporate unspanned factors andallows estimation of term structure models without observing a zero-coupon yield curve.
This paper analyzes the predictive content of the term structure components level, slope, and curvature within a dynamic factor model of macroeconomic and interest rate data. Surprise changes of the three components are identified using sign restrictions, and their macroeconomic underpinnings are studied via impulse response analysis. The curvature factor is found to carry predictive information both about the future evolution of the yield curve and the macroeconomy. In particular, unexpected increases of the curvature factor precede a flattening of the yield curve and announce a significant decline of output more than 1 year ahead.
In September 2008, a six-year-old article about the 2002 bankruptcy of United Airlines' parent company resurfaced on the Internet and was mistakenly believed to be reporting a new bankruptcy filing by the company. This episode caused the company's stock price to drop by as much as 76% in just a few minutes, before NASDAQ halted trading. After the “news” had been identified as false, the stock price rebounded, but still ended the day 11.2% below the previous close. We explore this natural experiment by using a simple asset-pricing model to study the aftermath of this false news shock. We find that, after three trading sessions, the company's stock was still trading below the two-standard-deviation band implied by the model and that it returned to within one standard deviation only during the sixth trading session. On the seventh day after the episode, the stock was trading at the level predicted by the asset-pricing model. We investigate several potential explanations for this finding, but fail to find empirical evidence supporting any of them. We also document that the false news shock had a persistent negative effect on the stock prices of other major airline companies. This is consistent with the view that contagion effects would have dominated competitive effects had the bankruptcy actually takenplace.
This paper studies the linkages between housing and consumption in the United States taking into account regional variation.We estimate national and regional housing factors from a comprehensive set of U.S. price and quantity data available at mixed frequencies and over different time spans. Our housing factors pick up the common components in the data and are less affected by the idiosyncratic noise in individual series. This allows us to get more reliable estimates of the consumption effects of housing market shocks. We find that shocks at the national level have large cumulative effects on retail sales in all regions. Though the effects of regional shocks are smaller, they are also significant. We analyse the driving forces of housing market activity by means of factor-augmented vector autoregressions. Our results show that lowering mortgage rates has a larger effect than a similar reduction of the federalfunds rate. Moreover, lower consumer confidence and stock prices can slow the recovery in the housing market.
The macro risk premium measures the threshold return for real activity that receives funding from savers. The balance sheet conditions of financial intermediaries provide a window on the macro risk premium. The tightness of intermediaries’ balance sheet constraints determines their ‘‘risk appetite,’’ which in turn, determines the set of real projects that receive funding, and hence determines the supply of credit. Monetary policy affects risk appetite by changing intermediaries’ ability to leverage their capital. This paper estimates the time-varying risk appetite of financial intermediaries for the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, and Japan, and studies the joint dynamics of risk appetite with macroeconomic aggregates for the United States. The paper argues that risk appetite is an important indicator for monetary conditions.
In the median sector, 100 percent of the long-run response of the sectoral price index to a sector-specific shock occurs in the month of the shock. The standard Calvo model and the standard sticky-information model can match this finding only under extreme assumptions concerning the profit-maximizing price. The rational inattention model of Mackowiak and Wiederholt [2009a. Optimal sticky prices under rational inattention. American Economic Review 99, 769–803] can match this finding without an extreme assumption concerning the profit-maximizing price. Furthermore, there is little variation across sectors in the speed of response of sectoral price indexes to sector-specific shocks. The rational inattention model matches this finding, while the Calvo model predicts too much cross-sectional variation.
This paper suggests a term structure model which parsimoniously exploits a broad macroeconomic information set. The model uses the short rate and the common components of a large number of macroeconomic variables as factors. Precisely, the dynamics of the short rate are modeled with a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression and the term structure is derived using parameter restrictions impliedly no-arbitrage. The model has economic appeal and provides better out-of-sample yield forecast sat intermediate and long horizons than a number of previously suggested approaches. The forecast improvement is highly significant and particularly pronounced for short and medium-term maturities.
This paper is an exercise in dating the Euro area business cycle on a monthly basis. Using a quite flexible interpolation routine, we construct several monthly series of Euro area real GDP, and then apply the Bry-Boschan (1971) procedure. To account for the asymmetry in growth regimes and duration across business cycle phases, we propose to extend this method with a combined amplitude/phase-length criterion ruling out expansionary phases that are short and flat. Applying the extended procedure to US and Euro area data, we are able to replicate approximately the dating decisions of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
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