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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 ...
Working Paper
Anchored to the Dot Plot: Central Bank Projections and Interest Rate Expectations
In January 2012, the Federal Reserve began publishing the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) "dot plot," revealing FOMC participants' projections for the federal funds rate. This paper documents a dual role for SEP projections in the formation of private interest-rate expectations. On one hand, SEP projections contain valuable information, achieving lower forecast errors than consensus surveys, VAR models, and several market-based measures at many horizons. Because the SEP is informative, some reliance on it by private forecasters is natural. On the other hand, because the SEP is updated ...
Discussion Paper
Forecasting Stock Market Crashes is Hard--Especially Future Ones: Can Option Prices Help?
Stock market gyrations are notoriously hard to predict, and not for lack of effort by legions of investors, market commentators and academics. In this article, we investigate whether efforts to forecast stock market crashes, in particular, can be aided by using information embedded in options prices.
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.
Discussion Paper
(Don't Fear) The Yield Curve
In this note, we show that, for predicting recessions, such measures of a "long-term spread"--the spread in yields between a far-off maturity such as 10 years and a shorter maturity such as 1 or 2 years--are statistically dominated by a more economically intuitive alternative, a "near-term forward spread."
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 ...