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Discussion Paper
Has the Inflation Risk Premium Fallen? Is it Now Negative?
In this note, we examine the theoretical determinants of one important component of inflation compensation, the inflation risk premium, and argue that a secular decline in the inflation risk premium may be responsible for a substantial portion of the decline in inflation compensation in recent years.
Working Paper
Risk, uncertainty, and asset prices
We identify the relative importance of changes in the conditional variance of fundamentals (which we call "uncertainty") and changes in risk aversion ("risk" for short) in the determination of the term structure, equity prices, and risk premiums. Theoretically, we introduce persistent time-varying uncertainty about the fundamentals in an external habit model. The model matches the dynamics of dividend and consumption growth, including their volatility dynamics and many salient asset market phenomena. While the variation in dividend yields and the equity risk premium is primarily driven by ...
Working Paper
Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply Effects of COVID-19: A Real-time Analysis
We extract aggregate demand and supply shocks for the US economy from real-time survey data on inflation and real GDP growth using a novel identification scheme. Our approach exploits non-Gaussian features of macroeconomic forecast revisions and imposes minimal theoretical assumptions. After verifying that our results for U.S. post-World War II business cycle fluctuations are largely in line with the prevailing consensus, we proceed to study output and price fluctuations during the COVID-19 pandemic. We attribute two thirds of the decline in 2020:Q1 GDP to a negative shock to aggregate ...
Working Paper
Soft Landing or Stagflation? A Framework for Estimating the Probabilities of Macro Scenarios
Amid ongoing trade policy shifts and geopolitical uncertainty, concerns about stagflation have reemerged as a key macroeconomic risk. This paper develops a probabilistic framework to estimate the likelihood of stagflation versus soft landing scenarios over a four-quarter horizon. Building on Bekaert, Engstrom, and Ermolov (2025), the model integrates survey forecasts, structural shock decomposition, and a non-Gaussian BEGE-GARCH approach to capture time-varying volatility and skewness. Results suggest that the probability of stagflation was elevated at around 30 percent in late 2022, while ...
Conference Paper
Inflation and the stock market: Understanding the “Fed Model”
The so-called Fed model postulates that the dividend or earnings yield on stocks should equal the yield on nominal Treasury bonds, or at least that the two should be highly correlated. In US data there is indeed a strikingly high time series correlation between the yield on nominal bonds and the dividend yield on equities. This positive correlation is often attributed to the fact that both bond and equity yields comove strongly and positively with expected inflation. While inflation comoves with nominal bond yields for well-known reasons, the positive correlation between expected inflation ...
Discussion Paper
(Don't Fear) The Yield Curve, Reprise
In recent months, financial market perceptions about the future path of short-term interest rates have evolved amidst signals from policymakers suggesting that reduced monetary policy accommodation is in the offing. As with previous episodes of policy tightening, most recently in 2018, one can hear an attendant rise in the volume of commentary about a decline in the slope of the yield curve and the risk of "inversion," whereby long-term yields fall below shorter-maturity yields.