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Working Paper
Does commonality in illiquidity matter to investors?
This paper investigates whether investors are compensated for taking on commonality risk in equity portfolios. A large literature documents the existence and the causes of commonality in illiquidity, but the implications for investors are less understood. We find a return premium for commonality risk in NYSE stocks that is both economically and statistically significant. The commonality risk premium is independent of illiquidity level effects, and robust to variations in illiquidity measurement and systematic illiquidity estimation. We also show that precision in commonality risk estimation ...
Working Paper
Does money matter in inflation forecasting?
This paper provides the most fully comprehensive evidence to date on whether or not monetary aggregates are valuable for forecasting US inflation in the early to mid 2000s. We explore a wide range of different definitions of money, including different methods of aggregation and different collections of included monetary assets. In our forecasting experiment we use two non-linear techniques, namely, recurrent neural networks and kernel recursive least squares regression - techniques that are new to macroeconomics. Recurrent neural networks operate with potentially unbounded input memory, while ...
Working Paper
Dynamics in systematic liquidity
We develop the principal component analysis (PCA) approach to systematic liquidity measurement by introducing moving and expanding estimation windows. We evaluate these methods along with traditional estimation techniques (full sample PCA and market average) in terms of ability to explain (1) cross-sectional stock liquidity and (2) cross-sectional stock returns. For several traditional liquidity measures our results suggest an expanding window specification for systematic liquidity estimation. However, for price impact liquidity measures we find support for a moving window specification. The ...
Working Paper
Mean-variance vs. full-scale optimization: broad evidence for the U.K.
In the Full-Scale Optimization approach the complete empirical financial return probability distribution is considered, and the utility maximising solution is found through numerical optimization. Earlier studies have shown that this approach is useful for investors following non-linear utility functions (such as bilinear and S-shaped utility) and choosing between highly non-normally distributed assets, such as hedge funds. We clarify the role of (mathematical) smoothness and differentiability of the utility function in the relative performance of FSO among a broad class of utility functions. ...
Working Paper
Connectionist-based rules describing the pass-through of individual goods prices into trend inflation in the United States
This paper examines the inflation "pass-through" problem in American monetary policy, defined as the relationship between changes in the growth rates of individual goods and the subsequent economy-wide rate of growth of consumer prices. Granger causality tests robust to structural breaks are used to establish initial relationships. Then, feedforward artificial neural network (ANN) is used to approximate the functional relationship between selected component subindexes and the headline CPI. Moving beyond the ANN ?black box,? we illustrate how decision rules can be extracted from the network. ...