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Discussion Paper
Survey Measures of Expectations for the Policy Rate
Market prices provide timely information on policy expectations. But as we emphasized in our previous post, they can deviate from investors? expectations of the most likely path because they embed risk premiums and represent probability-weighted averages over different possible paths. In contrast, surveys explicitly ask respondents for their views on the likely path of economic variables. In this post, we highlight two surveys conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that provide information about expectations that can complement market-based measures.
Discussion Paper
Treasury Term Premia: 1961-Present
Treasury yields can be decomposed into two components: expectations of the future path of short-term Treasury yields and the Treasury term premium. The term premium is the compensation that investors require for bearing the risk that short-term Treasury yields do not evolve as they expected. Studying the term premium over a long time period allows us to investigate what has historically driven changes in Treasury yields. In this blog post, we estimate and analyze the Treasury term premium from 1961 to the present, and make these estimates available for download here.
Report
Pricing the term structure with linear regressions
We estimate the time series and cross section of bond returns by way of three-stage ordinary least squares, which we label dynamic Fama-MacBeth regressions. Our approach allows for estimation of models with a large number of pricing factors. Even though we do not impose yield cross-equation restrictions in the estimation, we show that our bond return regressions generate a term structure of interest rates with small yield errors when compared with commonly reported specifications. We uncover specifications that give rise to lower pricing errors than do commonly advocated specifications, both ...
Discussion Paper
Preparing for Takeoff? Professional Forecasters and the June 2013 FOMC Meeting
Following the June 18-19 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting different measures of short-term interest rates increased notably. In the chart below, we plot two such measures: the two-year Treasury yield and the one-year overnight indexed swap (OIS) forward rate, one year in the future. The vertical line indicates the final day of the June FOMC meeting. To what extent did this rise in rates following the June FOMC meeting reflect a shift in the expected future path of the federal funds rate (FFR)? Market participants and policy makers often directly read the expected path from ...
Report
Regression-based estimation of dynamic asset pricing models
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 test. We ...
Journal Article
Inflation: Drivers and Dynamics 2020 CEBRA Annual Meeting Session Summary
The Cleveland Fed’s Center for Inflation Research sponsored a session on inflation dynamics at the 2020 CEBRA annual meeting. The presentations focused on inflation expectations and firms’ price-setting behavior. This Economic Commentary summarizes the papers presented during the session.
Report
Fundamental Disagreement about Monetary Policy and the Term Structure of Interest Rates
Using a unique data set of individual professional forecasts, we document disagreement about the future path of monetary policy, particularly at longer horizons. The stark differences in short rate forecasts imply strong disagreement about the risk-return trade-off of longer-term bonds. Longer-horizon short rate disagreement co-moves with term premiums. We estimate an affine term structure model in which investors hold heterogeneous beliefs about the long-run level of rates. Our model fits Treasury yields and the short rate paths predicted by different groups of investors and thus matches the ...
Report
The Term Structure of Expectations
Economic theory predicts that intertemporal decisions depend critically on expectations about future outcomes. Using the universe of professional survey forecasts for the United States, we document the behavior of the entire term structure of expectations for output growth, inflation, and the policy rate. We show that a simple unobserved components model of the trend and cycle explains the joint behavior of both consensus measures of expectations and the observed disagreement among individual forecasters. Importantly, univariate models of each variable are outperformed by a multivariate model ...
Discussion Paper
Data Insight: Which Growth Rate? It’s a Weighty Subject
The growth rate in real gross domestic product (GDP) is a conventional indicator of the economy’s health. But the two ways of measuring annual GDP growth can give very different answers. In 2013, GDP grew 2.2 percent on a year-over-year basis, but at a faster 3.1 percent rate on a Q4-over-Q4 basis. So, which measure is more meaningful? We show in this post that the Q4/Q4 metric is better since it only considers quarterly growth rates during the current year, while the Year/Year measure depends on quarterly growth rates in both the current and previous year and puts considerable weight on ...
Report
What predicts U.S. recessions?
We reassess the predictability of U.S. recessions at horizons from three months to two years ahead for a large number of previously proposed leading-indicator variables. We employ an efficient probit estimator for partially missing data and assess relative model performance based on the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. While the Treasury term spread has the highest predictive power at horizons four to six quarters ahead, adding lagged observations of the term spread significantly improves the predictability of recessions at shorter horizons. Moreover, balances in broker-dealer ...