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Journal Article
Financial Engineering Versus Cancer
If financial engineering can distribute the pecuniary risk of medical research, then it can play a role in curing cancer.
Working Paper
Inflation Expectations, Liquidity Premia and Global Spillovers in Japanese Bond Markets
We provide market-based estimates of Japanese inflation expectations using an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model of nominal and real yields that accounts for liquidity premia and the deflation protection afforded by Japanese inflation-indexed bonds, known as JGBi’s. We find that JGBi liquidity premia exhibit significant variation, and even switch sign. Properly accounting for them significantly lowers the estimated value of the indexed bonds’ deflation protection and affects inflation risk premium estimates. After liquidity adjustment, long-term Japanese inflation expectations ...
Working Paper
From Which Consumption-Based Asset Pricing Models Can Investors Profit? Evidence from Model-Based Priors
This paper compares consumption-based asset pricing models based on the forecasting performance of investors who use economic constraints derived from the models to predict the equity premium. Three prominent asset pricing models are considered: Habit Formation, Long Run Risk, and Prospect Theory. I propose a simple Bayesian framework through which the investors impose the economic constraints as model-based priors on the parameters of their predictive regressions. An investor whose prior beliefs are rooted in the Long Run Risk model achieves more accurate forecasts overall. The greatest ...
Report
Simple and reliable way to compute option-based risk-neutral distributions
This paper describes a method for computing risk-neutral density functions based on the option-implied volatility smile. Its aim is to reduce complexity and provide cookbook-style guidance through the estimation process. The technique is robust and avoids violations of option no-arbitrage restrictions that can lead to negative probabilities and other implausible results. I give examples for equities, foreign exchange, and long-term interest rates.
Working Paper
The Effect of Large Investors on Asset Quality: Evidence from Subprime Mortgage Securities
The government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?the dominant investors in subprime mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 crisis?substantively affected collateral composition in this market. Mortgages included in securities designed for the GSEs performed better than those backing other securities in the same deals, holding observable risk constant. Consistent with the transmission of private information, these effects are concentrated in low-documentation loans and for issuers that were highly dependent on the GSEs and were corporate affiliates of the mortgage ...
Report
Assessing financial stability: the Capital and Loss Assessment under Stress Scenarios (CLASS) model
The CLASS model is a top-down capital stress testing framework that uses public data, simple econometric models, and auxiliary assumptions to project the effect of macroeconomic scenarios on U.S. banking firms. Through the lens of the model, we find that the total banking system capital shortfall under stressful macroeconomic conditions began to rise four years before the financial crisis, peaking in the fourth quarter of 2008. The capital gap has since fallen sharply, and is now significantly below pre-crisis levels. In the cross section, banking firms estimated to be most sensitive to ...
Working Paper
Financial Nowcasts and Their Usefulness in Macroeconomic Forecasting
Financial data often contain information that is helpful for macroeconomic forecasting, while multistep forecast accuracy also benefits by incorporating good nowcasts of macroeconomic variables. This paper considers the role of nowcasts of financial variables in making conditional forecasts of real and nominal macroeconomic variables using standard quarterly Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs). For nowcasting the quarterly value of a variety of financial variables, we document that the average of the available daily data and a daily random walk forecast to fill in the missing days in the ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy surprises, positions of traders, and changes in commodity futures prices
Using futures data for the period 1990?2008, this paper finds evidence that expansionary monetary policy surprises tend to increase crude and heating oil prices, and contractionary monetary policy shocks increase gold and platinum prices. Our analysis uncovers substantial heterogeneity in the magnitude of this response to positive and negative surprises across different commodities and commodity groups. The results also suggest that the positions of futures traders for the metals and energy commodities strongly respond to monetary policy shocks. The adjustment of the net long positions of ...
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
Bayesian Inference and Prediction of a Multiple-Change-Point Panel Model with Nonparametric Priors
Change point models using hierarchical priors share in the information of each regime when estimating the parameter values of a regime. Because of this sharing, hierarchical priors have been very successful when estimating the parameter values of short-lived regimes and predicting the out-of-sample behavior of the regime parameters. However, the hierarchical priors have been parametric. Their parametric nature leads to global shrinkage that biases the estimates of the parameter coefficient of extraordinary regimes toward the value of the average regime. To overcome this shrinkage, we model ...