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Discussion Paper
Introduction to a Series on Market Liquidity
Market participants and policymakers have recently raised concerns about market liquidity?the ability to buy and sell securities quickly, at any time, at minimal cost. Market liquidity supports the efficient allocation of capital through financial markets, which is a catalyst for sustainable economic growth. Changes in market liquidity, whether due to regulation, changes in market structure, or otherwise, are therefore of great interest to policymakers and market participants alike.
Discussion Paper
The Evolution of Workups in the U.S. Treasury Securities Market
The market for benchmark U.S. Treasury securities is one of the deepest and most liquid in the world. Although trading in the interdealer market for these securities is over-the-counter, it features a central limit order book (CLOB) similar to that found in exchange-traded instruments, such as equities and futures. A distinctive feature of this market is the ?workup? protocol, whereby the execution of a marketable order opens a short time window during which market participants can transact additional volume at the same price. With the broadening of the interdealer market to include hedge ...
Discussion Paper
What to Make of Market Measures of Inflation Expectations?
Central banks and investors around the world closely monitor developments in financial markets to gauge expectations of future interest rates and inflation. In this post, we argue that two of the most commonly used market-based inflation expectations measures—TIPS breakevens and inflation swaps—are noisy. Although movements in both measures provide policymakers with valuable information, readings should always be interpreted with care.
Report
Decomposing short-term return reversal
The profit to a standard short-term return reversal strategy can be decomposed analytically into four components: 1) across-industry return momentum, 2) within-industry variation in expected returns, 3) under-reaction to within-industry cash flow news, and 4) a residual. Only the residual component, which isolates reaction to recent ?nonfundamental? price changes, is significant and positive in the data. A simple short-term return reversal trading strategy designed to capture the residual component generates a highly significant risk-adjusted return three times the size of the standard ...
Discussion Paper
Introduction to a Series on Market Liquidity: Part 2
Market participants and policymakers have raised concerns about the potential adverse effects of financial regulation on market liquidity?the ability to buy and sell securities quickly, at any time, at minimal cost. Market liquidity supports the efficient allocation of capital through financial markets, which is a catalyst for sustainable economic growth. Changes in market liquidity, whether due to regulation or other forces, are therefore of great interest to policymakers and market participants alike.
Discussion Paper
Continuing the Conversation on Liquidity
Market participants and policymakers have raised concerns about market liquidity?the ability to buy and sell securities quickly, at any time, at minimal cost. Market liquidity supports the efficient allocation of financial capital, which is a catalyst for sustainable economic growth. Any possible decline in market liquidity, whether due to regulation or otherwise, is of interest to policymakers and market participants alike.
Report
Characteristic-Sorted Portfolios: Estimation and Inference
Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies. Despite its popularity, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure. We develop a general framework for portfolio sorting by casting it as a nonparametric estimator. We present valid asymptotic inference methods, and a valid mean square error expansion of the estimator leading to an optimal choice for the number of portfolios. In practical settings, the optimal choice may be much larger than standard choices of five or ten. To ...
Working Paper
Calculating and using second order accurate solutions of discrete time dynamic equilibrium models
We describe an algorithm for calculating second order approximations to the solutions to nonlinear stochastic rational expectation models. The paper also explains methods for using such an approximate solution to generate forecasts, simulated time paths for the model, and evaluations of expected welfare differences across different versions of a model. The paper gives conditions for local validity of the approximation that allow for disturbance distributions with unbounded support and allow for non-stationarity of the solution process.
Working Paper
A robust neighborhood truncation approach to estimation of integrated quarticity
We provide a first in-depth look at robust estimation of integrated quarticity (IQ) based on high frequency data. IQ is the key ingredient enabling inference about volatility and the presence of jumps in financial time series and is thus of considerable interest in applications. We document the significant empirical challenges for IQ estimation posed by commonly encountered data imperfections and set forth three complementary approaches for improving IQ based inference. First, we show that many common deviations from the jump diffusive null can be dealt with by a novel filtering scheme that ...
Discussion Paper
Primary Dealer Participation in the Secondary U.S. Treasury Market
The recent Joint Staff Report on October 15, 2014, exploring an episode of unprecedented volatility in the U.S. Treasury market, revealed that primary dealers no longer account for most trading volume on the interdealer brokerage (IDB) platforms. This shift is noteworthy because dealers contribute to long-term liquidity provision via their willingness to hold positions across days. However, a large share of Treasury security trading occurs elsewhere, in the dealer-to-customer (DtC) market. In this post, we show that primary dealers maintain a majority share of secondary market trading volume ...