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Working Paper
Is the Intrinsic Value of Macroeconomic News Announcements Related to their Asset Price Impact?
The literature documents a heterogeneous asset price response to macroeconomic news announcements. We explain this variation with a novel measure of the intrinsic value of an announcement - the announcement's ability to nowcast GDP growth, inflation, and the Federal Funds Target Rate-and decompose it into the announcement's relation to fundamentals, a timeliness premium, and a revision premium. We find that differences in intrinsic value can explain a significant fraction of the variation in the announcements' price impact on Treasury bond yields. The announcements' timeliness and relation to ...
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The Bitcoin–Macro Disconnect
This paper investigates the link between Bitcoin and macroeconomic fundamentals by estimating the impact of macroeconomic news on Bitcoin using an event study with intraday data. The key result is that, unlike other U.S. asset classes, Bitcoin is orthogonal to monetary and macroeconomic news. This disconnect is puzzling as unexpected changes in discount rates should, in principle, affect the price of Bitcoin even when interpreting Bitcoin as a purely speculative asset.
Working Paper
Information in Yield Spread Trades
Using positions data on bond futures, I document that speculators' spread trades contain private information about future economic activities and asset prices. Strong steepening trades are associated with negative payroll surprises in subsequent months and can predict asset markets' reaction to future payroll releases, suggesting that speculators hold superior information about future payrolls. Steepening trades can also predict the rise of stock prices within a few hours before subsequent FOMC announcements, implying that the pre-FOMC stock drift is driven by informed speculation. Overall, ...
Working Paper
A Fundamental Connection: Exchange Rates and Macroeconomic Expectations
This paper presents new stylized facts about exchange rates and their relationship with macroeconomic fundamentals. We show that macroeconomic surprises explain a large majority of the variation in nominal exchange rate changes at a quarterly frequency. Using a novel present value decomposition of exchange rate changes that is disciplined with survey forecast data, we show that macroeconomic surprises are also a very important driver of the currency risk premium component and explain about half of its variation. These surprises have even greater explanatory power during economic downturns and ...
Working Paper
The US, Economic News, and the Global Financial Cycle
We provide evidence for a causal link between the US economy and the global financial cycle. Using intraday data, we show that US macroeconomic news releases have large and significant effects on global risky asset prices. Stock price indexes of 27 countries, the VIX, and commodity prices all jump instantaneously upon news releases. The responses of stock indexes co-move across countries and are large - often comparable in size to the response of the S&P 500. Further, US macroeconomic news explains on average 23 percent of the quarterly variation in foreign stock markets. The joint behavior ...
Working Paper
Low Frequency Effects of Macroeconomic News on Government Bond Yields
This study analyzes the reaction of the U.S. Treasury bond market to innovations in macroeconomic fundamentals. We identify these innovations with macroeconomic news, defined as differences between the actual releases and their market expectations. We show that macroeconomic news explain about one-third of the low frequency (quarterly) fluctuations of long-term bond yields. When focusing on the high frequency (daily) movements this share decreases to one-tenth. This result is due to the fact that macro news have a persistent effect on the yield curve. Non-fundamental factors, instead, ...