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Working Paper
Corporate Green Pledges
We identify corporate commitments for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions—green pledges—from news articles using a large language model. About 8% of publicly traded U.S. companies have made green pledges, and these companies tend to be larger and browner than those without pledges. Announcements of green pledges significantly and persistently raise stock prices, consistent with reductions in the carbon premium. Firms that make green pledges subsequently reduce their CO2 emissions. Our evidence suggests that green pledges are credible, have material new information for investors, and ...
Working Paper
Robust bond risk premia
A consensus has recently emerged that a number of variables in addition to the level, slope, and curvature of the term structure can help predict interest rates and excess bond returns. We demonstrate that the statistical tests that have been used to support this conclusion are subject to very large size distortions from a previously unrecognized problem arising from highly persistent regressors and correlation between the true predictors and lags of the dependent variable. We revisit the evidence using tests that are robust to this problem and conclude that the current consensus is wrong. ...
Journal Article
Optimal policy and market-based expectations
Financial market prices contain valuable information about investors? views regarding future interest rates, inflation, and other economic variables. However, such market-based expectations can be hard to interpret because changes in risk and liquidity premiums also affect asset prices. In practice, policymakers should be cautious in relying on the expectations information in market prices.
Journal Article
Do macro variables help forecast interest rates?
Some recent research has suggested that macroeconomic variables, such as output and inflation, can improve interest rate forecasts. However, the evidence for this puzzling result is based on unreliable statistical tests. A new simple method more reliably assesses which variables are useful for forecasting. The results from this method suggest that some of the published evidence on the predictive power of macroeconomic variables may be spurious, supporting the more traditional view that current interest rates contain all the relevant information for predicting future interest rates.
Working Paper
The Fed's Response to Economic News Explains the “Fed Information Effect”
High-frequency changes in interest rates around FOMC announcements are a standard method of measuring monetary policy shocks. However, some recent studies have documented puzzling effects of these shocks on private-sector forecasts of GDP, unemployment, or inflation that are opposite in sign to what standard macroeconomic models would predict. This evidence has been viewed as supportive of a “Fed information effect” channel of monetary policy, whereby an FOMC tightening (easing) communicates that the economy is stronger (weaker) than the public had expected. We show that these empirical ...
Working Paper
Restrictions on Risk Prices in Dynamic Term Structure Models
Restrictions on the risk-pricing in dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) tighten the link between cross-sectional and time-series variation of interest rates, and make absence of arbitrage useful for inference about expectations. This paper presents a new econometric framework for estimation of affine Gaussian DTSMs under restrictions on risk prices, which addresses the issues of a large model space and of model uncertainty using a Bayesian approach. A simulation study demonstrates the good performance of the proposed method. Data for U.S. Treasury yields calls for tight restrictions on risk ...
Journal Article
Bridging the Gap: Forecasting Interest Rates with Macro Trends
Interest rates are inherently difficult to predict, and the simple random walk benchmark has proven hard to beat. But macroeconomics can help, because the long-run trend in interest rates is driven by the trend in inflation and the equilibrium real interest rate. When forecasting rates several years into the future, substantial gains are possible by predicting that the gap between current interest rates and this long-run trend will close with increasing forecast horizon. This evidence suggests that accounting for macroeconomic trends is important for understanding, modeling, and forecasting ...
Journal Article
Current Recession Risk According to the Yield Curve
The slope of the Treasury yield curve is a popular recession predictor with an excellent track record. The two most common alternative measures of the slope typically move together but have diverged recently, making the resulting recession signals unclear. Economic arguments and empirical evidence, including its more accurate predictions, favor the difference between 10-year and 3-month Treasury securities. Recession probabilities for the next year derived from this spread so far remain modest.
Working Paper
Inflation Expectations and the News
This paper provides new evidence on the importance of inflation expectations for variation in nominal interest rates, based on both market-based and survey-based measures of inflation expectations. Using the information in TIPS breakeven rates and inflation swap rates, I document that movements in inflation compensation are important for explaining variation in long-term nominal interest rates, both unconditionally as well as conditionally on macroeconomic data surprises. Daily changes in inflation compensation and changes in long-term nominal rates generally display a close statistical ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Expectations at the Zero Lower Bound
Obtaining monetary policy expectations from the yield curve is difficult near the zero lower bound (ZLB). Standard dynamic term structure models, which ignore the ZLB, can be misleading. Shadow-rate models are better suited for this purpose, because they account for the distributional asymmetry in projected short rates induced by the ZLB. Besides providing better interest rate fit and forecasts, our shadow-rate models deliver estimates of the future monetary policy liftoff from the ZLB that are closer to survey expectations. We also document significant improvements for inference about ...