Search Results
Working Paper
The high-frequency impact of news on long-term yields and forward rates: Is it real?
This paper uses high-frequency intradaily data to estimate the effects of macroeconomic news announcements on yields and forward rates on nominal and index-linked bonds, and on inflation compensation. To our knowledge, it is the first study in the macro announcements literature to use intradaily real yield data, which allow us to parse the effects of news announcements on real rates and inflation compensation far more precisely than we can using daily data. Long-term nominal yields and forward rates are very sensitive to macroeconomic news announcements. We find that inflation compensation is ...
Working Paper
Refining Set-Identification in VARs through Independence
Identification in VARs has traditionally mainly relied on second moments. Some researchers have considered using higher moments as well, but there are concerns about the strength of the identification obtained in this way. In this paper, we propose refining existing identification schemes by augmenting sign restrictions with a requirement that rules out shocks whose higher moments significantly depart from independence. This approach does not assume that higher moments help with identification; it is robust to weak identification. In simulations we show that it controls coverage well, in ...
Working Paper
Market Effects of Central Bank Credit Markets Support Programs in Europe
Using responses of credit default swap indexes to ECB monetary policy announcements, we isolate a novel credit policy component of monetary policy surprises. We examine how such unconventional monetary policy surprises affect investor perceptions of credit risk and the functioning of primary corporate debt markets. Favorable credit surprises cause declines in uncertainty about credit risk and suggest a more stable outlook on its dynamics over the following months. Both net and gross corporate bond issuance increase as a result of favorable credit surprises, with the largest response in ...
Working Paper
News and noise in G-7 GDP announcements
Revisions to GDP announcements are known to be quite large in all G-7 countries: many revisions in quarterly GDP growth are over a full percentage point at an annualized rate. In this paper, we examine the predictability of these data revisions. Previous work suggests that U.S. GDP revisions are largely unpredictable, as would be the case if the revisions reflect news not available at the time that the preliminary number is produced. We find that the degree of predictability varies throughout the G-7. For the U.S., the revisions are very slightly predictable, but for Italy, Japan and the UK, ...
Working Paper
An empirical comparison of Bundesbank and ECB monetary policy rules
We estimate a monetary policy reaction function for the Bundesbank and use it as a benchmark to assess the monetary policy of the ECB since the launch of the euro in January 1999. We find that euro interest rates are low relative to this benchmark. We consider several possible reasons for this, including the divergence between core and headline inflation, inflation having turned out to be higher than could have been foreseen by the ECB and the possibility that the ECB is focussing only on macroeconomic conditions in a subset of member countries. We argue that these potential explanations ...
Working Paper
Bond risk premia and realized jump volatility
We find that adding a measure of market jump volatility risk to a regression of excess bond returns on the term structure of forward rates nearly doubles the R square of the regression. Our market jump volatility measure is based on the realized jumps identified from high-frequency stock market returns using the bi-power variation technique. The significant enhancement of bond return predictability is robust to different forecasting horizons, to using non-overlapping returns and to the choice of different window sizes in computing the jump volatility. This market jump volatility factor also ...
Discussion Paper
The Sensitivity of Long-Term Interest Rates: A Tale of Two Frequencies
The sensitivity of long-term interest rates to short-term interest rates is a central feature of the yield curve. This post, which draws on our Staff Report, shows that long- and short-term rates co-move to a surprising extent at high frequencies (over daily or monthly periods). However, since 2000, they co-move far less at lower frequencies (over six months or a year). We discuss potential explanations for this finding and its implications for the transmission of monetary policy.
Working Paper
Evaluating real-time VAR forecasts with an informative democratic prior
This paper proposes Bayesian forecasting in a vector autoregression using a democratic prior. This prior is chosen to match the predictions of survey respondents. In particular, the unconditional mean for each series in the vector autoregression is centered around long-horizon survey forecasts. Heavy shrinkage toward the democratic prior is found to give good real-time predictions of a range of macroeconomic variables, as these survey projections are good at quickly capturing endpoint-shifts.
Working Paper
Confidence intervals for long-horizon predictive regressions via reverse regressions
Long-horizon predictive regressions in finance pose formidable econometric problems when estimated using the sample sizes that are typically available. A remedy that has been proposed by Hodrick (1992) is to run a reverse regression in which short-horizon returns are projected onto a long-run mean of some predictor. By covariance stationarity, the slope coefficient is zero in the reverse regression if and only if it is zero in the original regression, but testing the hypothesis in the reverse regression avoids small sample problems. Unfortunately this only allows us to test the null of no ...
Working Paper
Uncovered interest parity: it works, but not for long
The failure of uncovered interest parity can be ascribed to the existence of a risk premium. The size of this risk premium may shrink to zero over sufficiently small intervals of time. In contrast, because no interest is paid on intradaily positions and interest is instead paid discretely at the point when a position is rolled over from one day to the next, the size of the interest differential remains fixed over any interval that covers the time of the discrete interest payment. This is true no matter how short that interval is. Using a large dataset of high frequency exchange rate data, we ...