Search Results
Journal Article
Cross-country personal saving rates
Journal Article
Taming the long-term spreads
Given the size of the underlying markets, cutting the cost of capital to firms and households by reducing the yields required on long-term corporate bonds and mortgages is a key policy objective.
Working Paper
How did the financial crisis alter the correlations of U.S. yield spreads?
We investigate the pairwise correlations of 11 U.S. fixed income yield spreads over a sample that includes the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. Using cross-sectional methods and non- parametric bootstrap breakpoint tests, we characterize the crisis as a period in which pairwise correlations between yield spreads were systematically and significantly altered in the sense that spreads comoved with one another much more than in normal times. We find evidence that, for almost half of the 55 pairs under investigation, the crisis has left spreads much more correlated than they were previously. ...
Working Paper
Does the macroeconomy predict U.K. asset returns in a nonlinear fashion? comprehensive out-of-sample evidence
We perform a comprehensive examination of the recursive, comparative predictive performance of a number of linear and non-linear models for UK stock and bond returns. We estimate Markov switching, threshold autoregressive (TAR), and smooth transition autoregressive (STR) regime switching models, and a range of linear specifications in addition to univariate models in which conditional heteroskedasticity is captured by GARCH type specifications and in which predicted volatilities appear in the conditional mean. The results demonstrate that U.K. asset returns require non-linear dynamics be ...
Working Paper
Regime shifts in mean-variance efficient frontiers: some international evidence
Regime switching models have been assuming an increasingly central role in financial applications because of their well-known ability to capture the presence of rich non-linear patterns in the joint distribution of asset returns. After reviewing key concepts and technical issues related to specifying, estimating, and using multivariate Markov switching models in financial applications, in this paper we examine how the presence of regimes in means, variances, and covariances of asset returns translates into explicit dynamics of the Markowitz mean-variance frontier. In particular, we show both ...
Journal Article
The effects of large-scale asset purchases on TIPS inflation expectations
Large-scale asset purchases may have limited power to raise TIPS-implied inflation expectations?something that might appeal to policymakers fighting deflation.
Journal Article
The dollar U-turn
Working Paper
Time and risk diversification in real estate investments: assessing the ex post economic value
Welfare gains to long-horizon investors may derive from time diversification that exploits non-zero intertemporal return correlations associated with predictable returns. Real estate may thus become more desirable if its returns are negatively serially correlated. While it could be important for long horizon investors, time diversification has been mostly investigated in asset menus without real estate and focusing on in-sample experiments. This paper evaluates ex post, out-of-sample gains from diversification when E-REITs belong to the investment opportunity set. We find that diversification ...
Working Paper
Equity portfolio diversification under time-varying predictability and comovements: evidence from Ireland, the US, and the UK
We use multivariate regime switching vector autoregressive models to characterize the time-varying linkages among short-term interest rates (monetary policy) and stock returns in the Irish, the US and UK markets. We find that two regimes, characterized as bear and bull states, are required to characterize the dynamics of returns and short-term rates. This implies that we cannot reject the hypothesis that the regimes driving the markets in the small open economy are largely synchronous with those typical of the major markets. We compute time-varying Sharpe ratios and recursive mean-variance ...
Working Paper
Non-linear predictability in stock and bond returns: when and where is it exploitable?
We systematically examine the comparative predictive performance of a number of alternative linear and non-linear models for stock and bond returns in the G7 countries. Besides Markov switching, threshold autoregressive (TAR), and smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) regime switching (predictive) regression models, we also estimate univariate models in which conditional heteroskedasticity is captured through GARCH, TARCH and EGARCH models and ARCH-in mean effects appear in the conditional mean. Although we fail to find a consistent winner/out-performer across all countries and asset ...