Search Results
Journal Article
Forecast evaluation with cross-sectional data: The Blue Chip Surveys
If economic forecasts are to be used for decision making, then being able to evaluate their accuracy is essential. Assessing accuracy using single variables from a forecast is acceptable as a first pass, but this approach has inherent problems. This article addresses some of these problems by evaluating and comparing the general accuracy of a set of multivariate forecasts over time. ; Using the methodology developed in Eisenbeis, Waggoner, and Zha (2002), the authors compare the economic forecasts in the Blue Chip Economic Indicators Survey. The survey, published monthly since 1977, contains ...
Journal Article
Transparency, expectations and forecasts
Many economists believe that a central bank?s transparency about its objectives, economic outlook, and policy changes affect the public?s views about future economic and financial conditions. In keeping with this theory, since 1994 the Federal Open Market Committee has gradually increased the transparency of its statements accompanying changes in the federal funds rate target. ; This article investigates whether private agents? ability to predict the economy?s direction has improved since 1994. The analysis focuses on forecasts of macroeconomic variables such as inflation, gross domestic ...
Journal Article
Issues in hedging options positions
Many financial institutions hold derivative securities in their portfolios, and frequently these securities need to be hedged for extended periods of time. Failure to hedge properly can expose an institution to sudden swings in the values of derivatives, such as options, resulting from large, unanticipated changes in the levels or volatilities of the underlying asset. Understanding the basic techniques employed for hedging derivative securities and their advantages and pitfalls is therefore of crucial importance. ; This article examines the popular valuation model for options developed by ...
Journal Article
The risks and rewards of selling volatility
The popular practice of selling market volatility through selling straddles exposes traders and investors to substantial risk, especially in equity markets. The returns can be very lucrative, but the probability of large negative returns far exceeds the probability of large positive returns. In fact, selling straddles has resulted in substantial losses at banks and hedge funds such as the former Barings PLC and Long Term Capital Management. ; This article outlines the risks and rewards associated with selling volatility by first examining the statistical properties of the returns generated by ...
Working Paper
A Gibbs simulator for restricted VAR models
Many economic applications call for simultaneous equations VAR modeling. We show that the existing importance sampler can be prohibitively inefficient for this type of models. We develop a Gibbs simulator that works for both simultaneous and recursive VAR models with a much broader range of linear restrictions than those in the existing literature. We show that the required computation is of an SUR type, and thus our method can be implemented cheaply even for large systems of multiple equations.
Working Paper
Closing the question on the continuation of turn-of-the-month effects: evidence from the S&P 500 Index futures contract
Prior research documents unusually high returns on the last trading day of the month and over the next three consecutive trading days. This phenomenon is known as the turn-of-the-month (TOTM) effect. According to Siegel (1998), why these anomalies occur is not well understood, and whether they will continue to be significant in the future is an open question. In this paper, we examine the S&P 500 futures contract for evidence that turn-of-the-month effects have continued. Transaction costs are low for index futures, and the absence of short-sale restrictions makes index futures an attractive ...
Working Paper
Asymmetric expectation effects of regime shifts and the Great Moderation
The possibility of regime shifts in monetary policy can have important effects on rational agents' expectation formation and equilibrium dynamics. In a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model where the monetary policy rule switches between a dovish regime that accommodates inflation and a hawkish regime that stabilizes inflation, the expectation effect is asymmetric across regimes. Such an asymmetric effect makes it difficult but still possible to generate substantial reductions in the volatilities of inflation and output as the monetary policy switches from the dovish regime to the ...
Working Paper
Markov-switching structural vector autoregressions: theory and application
This paper develops a new and easily implementable necessary and sufficient condition for the exact identification of a Markov-switching structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. The theorem applies to models with both linear and some nonlinear restrictions on the structural parameters. We also derive efficient MCMC algorithms to implement sign and long-run restrictions in Markov-switching SVARs. Using our methods, four well-known identification schemes are used to study whether monetary policy has changed in the euro area since the introduction of the European Monetary Union. We find ...
Working Paper
Transparency, expectations, and forecasts
In 1994, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began to release statements after each meeting. This paper investigates whether the public?s views about the current path of the economy and of future policy have been affected by changes in the Federal Reserve?s communications policy as reflected in private sector?s forecasts of future economic conditions and policy moves. In particular, has the ability of private agents to predict where the economy is going improved since 1994? If so, on which dimensions has the ability to forecast improved? We find evidence that the individuals? forecasts ...
Working Paper
Inference in Bayesian Proxy-SVARs
Motivated by the increasing use of external instruments to identify structural vector autoregressions (SVARs), we develop algorithms for exact finite sample inference in this class of time series models, commonly known as proxy-SVARs. Our algorithms make independent draws from the normal-generalized-normal family of conjugate posterior distributions over the structural parameterization of a proxy-SVAR. Importantly, our techniques can handle the case of set identification and hence they can be used to relax the additional exclusion restrictions unrelated to the external instruments often ...