Search Results
Working Paper
Evaluating \"correlation breakdowns\" during periods of market volatility
Financial market observers have noted that during periods of high market volatility, correlations between asset prices can differ substantially from those seen in quieter markets. For example, correlations among yield spreads were substantially higher during the fall of 1998 than in earlier or later periods. Such differences in correlations have been attributed either to structural breaks in the underlying distribution of returns or to "contagion" across markets that occurs only during periods of market turbulence. However, we argue that the differences may reflect nothing more than ...
Working Paper
Pitfalls in tests for changes in correlations
Correlations are crucial for pricing and hedging derivatives whose payoff depends on more than one asset. Typically, correlations computed separately for ordinary and stressful market conditions differ considerably, a pattern widely termed "correlation breakdown." As a result, risk managers worry that their hedges will be useless when they are most needed, namely during "stressful" market situations. ; We show that such worries may not be justified since "correlation breakdowns" can easily be generated by data whose distribution is stationary and, in particular, whose correlation ...
Working Paper
Frequency of observation and the estimation of integrated volatility in deep and liquid financial markets
Using two newly available ultrahigh-frequency datasets, we investigate empirically how frequently one can sample certain foreign exchange and U.S. Treasury security returns without contaminating estimates of their integrated volatility with market microstructure noise. Using volatility signature plots and a recently-proposed formal decision rule to select the sampling frequency, we find that one can sample FX returns as frequently as once every 15 to 20 seconds without contaminating volatility estimates; bond returns may be sampled as frequently as once every 2 to 3 minutes on days without ...
Working Paper
A note on the coefficient of determination in models with infinite variance variables
Since the seminal work of Mandelbrot (1963), alpha-stable distributions with infinite variance have been regarded as a more realistic distributional assumption than the normal distribution for some economic variables, especially financial data. After providing a brief survey of theoretical results on estimation and hypothesis testing in regression models with infinite-variance variables, we examine the statistical properties of the coefficient of determination in models with alpha-stable variables. If the regressor and error term share the same index of stability alpha
Journal Article
Indexes of the foreign exchange value of the dollar
At the end of 1998, the staff of the Federal Reserve Board introduced a new set of indexes of the foreign exchange value of the U.S. dollar. The staff made the changeover, from indexes that had been used since the late 1970s, for two reasons. First, five of the ten currencies in the staff's previous main index of the dollar's exchange value were about to be replaced by a single new currency, the euro. Second, developments in international trade since the late 1970s called for a broadening of the scope of the staff's dollar indexes and a closer alignment of the currency weights with U.S. trade ...
Conference Paper
Systemic risk in a model economy with a stylized banking system