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Conference Paper
The excess sensitivity of long-term interest rates: evidence and implications for macroeconomic models
This paper demonstrates that long-term forward interest rates in the U.S. often react considerably to surprises in macroeconomic data releases and monetary policy announcements. This behavior is in contrast to the prediction of many macroeconomic models, in which the long-run properties of the economy are assumed to be time-invariant and perfectly known by all economic agents: Under those assumptions, the shocks we consider would have only transitory effects on short-term interest rates, and hence would not generate large responses in forward rates. Our empirical findings suggest that private ...
Working Paper
Let’s twist again: a high-frequency event-study analysis of operation twist and its implications for QE2
This paper undertakes a modern event-study analysis of Operation Twist and compares its effects to those that should be expected for the recent quantitative policy announced by the Federal Reserve, dubbed "QE2". We first show that Operation Twist and QE2 are similar in magnitude. We identify six significant, discrete announcements in the course of Operation Twist that potentially could have had a major effect on financial markets, and show that four did have statistically significant effects. The cumulative effect of these six announcements on longer-term Treasury yields is highly ...
Working Paper
Identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks on exchange rates using high frequency data
This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks in an international vector autoregression. Using high-frequency data on the prices of Fed Funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of the FOMC-day Federal Reserve policy decision on financial variables, such as the exchange rate and the foreign interest rate. We show how this information can be used to achieve identification without having to make the usual strong assumption of a recursive ordering.
Journal Article
What we do and don't know about the term premium
Understanding long-term interest rate fluctuations requires one to understand what the term premium is and how it may change over time. In this Economic Letter, we define the term premium and explain the state of the art in measuring it. We conclude with some discussion of the limitations of our current knowledge.
Working Paper
Market-based measures of monetary policy expectations
A number of recent papers have used short-maturity financial instruments to measure expectations of the future course of monetary policy, and have used high-frequency changes in these instruments around FOMC dates to measure monetary policy shocks. This paper evaluates the empirical success of a variety of market instruments in predicting the future path of monetary policy. We find that federal funds futures dominate other market-based measures of monetary policy expectations at horizons out several months. For longer horizons, the predictive power of many of the instruments considered is ...
Working Paper
Models of sectoral reallocation
This paper demonstrates several strengths and shortcomings of models of sectoral reallocation. Although such models demonstrate that sectoral reallocation can be an important amplification and propagation mechanism for exogenous shocks, they are essentially unable to explain any effects of sectoral reallocation on aggregate productivity or related quantities (such as the real wage or observations of aggregate increasing returns to scale), unless a wedge is introduced into the model that drives the marginal products of inputs in different sectors apart in steady state. In particular, costs of ...
Working Paper
Risk aversion, risk premia, and the labor margin with generalized recursive preferences
A flexible labor margin allows households to absorb shocks to asset values with changes in hours worked as well as changes in consumption. This ability to absorb shocks along either or both margins greatly alters the household?s attitudes toward risk, as shown by Swanson (2012). The present paper extends that work to the case of generalized recursive preferences, as in Epstein and Zin (1989) and Weil (1989), which are increasingly being used to bring macroeconomic models into closer agreement with basic asset pricing facts. Measures of risk aversion commonly used in the literature show no ...
Working Paper
On signal extraction and non-certainty-equivalence in optimal monetary policy rules
A standard result in the literature on monetary policy rules is that of certainty equivalence: given the expected values of all the state variables of the economy, policy should be set in a way that is independent of all higher moments of those variables. Some exceptions to this rule have been pointed out by Smets (1998), who restricts policy to respond to only a limited subset of state variables, and by Orphanides (1998), who restricts policy to respond to estimates of the state variables that are biased. In contrast, this paper studies unrestricted, fully optimal policy rules with optimal ...
Conference Paper
Future prices as risk-adjusted forecasts of monetary policy
Many researchers have used federal funds futures rates as measures of financial markets? expectations of future monetary policy. However, to the extent that federal funds futures reflect risk premia, these measures require some adjustment for risk premia. In this paper, we document that excess returns on federal funds futures have been positive on average. We also document that expected excess returns are strongly countercyclical. In particular, excess returns are surprisingly predictable by employment growth and other business-cycle indicators such as Treasury yields and corporate bond ...
Working Paper
Does inflation targeting anchor long-run inflation expectations? evidence from long-term bond yields in the U.S., U.K., and Sweden
We investigate the extent to which inflation targeting helps anchor long-run inflation expectations by comparing the behavior of daily bond yield data in the United Kingdom and Sweden--both inflation targeters--to that in the United States, a non-inflation-targeter. Using the difference between far-ahead forward rates on nominal and inflation-indexed bonds as a measure of compensation for expected inflation and inflation risk at long horizons, we examine how much, if at all, far-ahead forward inflation compensation moves in response to macroeconomic data releases and monetary policy ...