Search Results
Discussion Paper
What Is Corporate Bond Market Distress?
Corporate bonds are a key source of funding for U.S. non-financial corporations and a key investment security for insurance companies, pension funds, and mutual funds. Distress in the corporate bond market can thus both impair access to credit for corporate borrowers and reduce investment opportunities for key financial sub-sectors. In a February 2021 Liberty Street Economics post, we introduced a unified measure of corporate bond market distress, the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI), then followed up in early June 2022 with a look at how corporate bond market functioning evolved ...
Working Paper
Interconnectedness in the Corporate Bond Market
Does interconnectedness improve market quality? Yes.We develop an alternative network structure, the assets network: assets are connected if they are held by the same investors. We use several large datasets to build the assets network for the corporate bond market. Through careful identification strategies based on the COVID-19 shock and “fallen angels,” we find that interconnectedness improves market quality especially during stress periods. Our findings contribute to the debate on the role of interconnectedness in financial markets and show that highly interconnected corporate bonds ...
Working Paper
The Contribution of Jump Signs and Activity to Forecasting Stock Price Volatility
We document the forecasting gains achieved by incorporating measures of signed, finite and infinite jumps in forecasting the volatility of equity prices, using high-frequency data from 2000 to 2016. We consider the SPY and 20 stocks that vary by sector, volume and degree of jump activity. We use extended HAR-RV models, and consider different frequencies (5, 60 and 300 seconds), forecast horizons (1, 5, 22 and 66 days) and the use of standard and robust-to-noise volatility and threshold bipower variation measures. Incorporating signed finite and infinite jumps generates significantly better ...
Working Paper
CONSUMER LENDING EFFICIENCY:COMMERCIAL BANKS VERSUS A FINTECH LENDER
We compare the performance of unsecured personal installment loans made by traditional bank lenders with that of LendingClub, using a stochastic frontier estimation technique to decompose the observed nonperforming loans into three components. The first is the best-practice minimum ratio that a lender could achieve if it were fully efficient at credit-risk evaluation and loan management. The second is a ratio that reflects the difference between the observed ratio (adjusted for noise) and the minimum ratio that gauges the lender?s relative proficiency at credit analysis and loan monitoring. ...
Working Paper
The dynamic factor network model with an application to global credit risk
We introduce a dynamic network model with probabilistic link functions that depend on stochastically time-varying parameters. We adopt the widely used blockmodel framework and allow the high-dimensional vector of link probabilities to be a function of a low-dimensional set of dynamic factors. The resulting dynamic factor network model is straightforward and transparent by nature. However, parameter estimation, signal extraction of the dynamic factors, and the econometric analysis generally are intricate tasks for which simulation-based methods are needed. We provide feasible and practical ...
Report
Risk-Free Rates and Convenience Yields Around the World
We infer risk-free rates from index option prices to estimate safe asset convenience yields in ten G-11 currencies. Countries' convenience yields increase linearly with the level of their interest rates, with U.S. convenience yields being the fifth largest. During financial crises, convenience yields grow, but the difference between U.S. and foreign convenience yields generally does not. Covered interest parity (CIP) deviations using our option-implied rates are roughly the same size between the U.S. and each other country. A model where convenience yields depend on domestic financial ...
Report
The equity risk premium: a review of models
We estimate the equity risk premium (ERP) by combining information from twenty models. The ERP in 2012 and 2013 reached heightened levels?of around 12 percent?not seen since the 1970s. We conclude that the high ERP was caused by unusually low Treasury yields.
Working Paper
Time-varying Volatility and the Power Law Distribution of Stock Returns
While many studies find that the tail distribution of high frequency stock returns follow a power law, there are only a few explanations for this finding. This study presents evidence that time-varying volatility can account for the power law property of high frequency stock returns. The power law coefficients obtained by estimating a conditional normal model with nonparametric volatility show a striking correspondence to the power law coefficients estimated from returns data for stocks in the Dow Jones index. A cross-sectional regression of the data coefficients on the model-implied ...
Working Paper
The Contribution of Jump Signs and Activity to Forecasting Stock Price Volatility
We propose a novel approach to decompose realized jump measures by type of activity (finite/infinite) and sign, and also provide noise-robust versions of the ABD jump test (Andersen et al., 2007b) and realized semivariance measures. We find that infinite (finite) jumps improve the forecasts at shorter (longer) horizons; but the contribution of signed jumps is limited. As expected, noise-robust measures deliver substantial forecast improvements at higher sampling frequencies, although standard volatility measures at the 300-second frequency generate the smallest MSPEs. Since no single model ...
Report
Announcement-Specific Decompositions of Unconventional Monetary Policy Shocks and Their Macroeconomic Effects
I propose to identify announcement-specific decompositions of asset price changes into monetary policy shocks exploiting heteroskedasticity in intraday data. This approach accommodates both changes in the nature of shocks and the state of the economy across announcements, allowing me to explicitly compare shocks across announcements. I compute decompositions with respect to Fed Funds, forward guidance, asset purchase, and Fed information shocks for 2007-19. Only a handful of announcements spark significant shocks. Both forward guidance and asset purchase shocks lower corporate yields and ...