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Journal Article
The Term Structure of the Excess Bond Premium: Measures and Implications
In this article, we construct daily aggregate as well as short-, medium-, and long-term "excess bond premium" (EBP) measures using a widely available corporate bond database (known as "TRACE"). The novel EBP measures we construct provide an important gauge of strains in the financial sector at different horizons. We find that the short-term EBP measure increased more dramatically at the peaks of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2007–09 global financial crisis, but the pattern was reversed around the interest rate liftoff at the end of 2015.
Working Paper
Forward Guidance and Its Effectiveness: A Macro Finance Shadow-Rate Framework
Forward guidance provides monetary policy communication for an economy at the effective lower bound (ELB). In this paper, we consider both calendar- and outcome-based forward guidance about the timing of liftoff. We develop a novel macro-finance shadow rate term structure model by introducing unspanned macro factors and an outcome-based liftoff condition. We estimate the model using the maximum likelihood method with extended Kalman filter. Based on the estimation results, we show that outcome-based forward guidance is indeed effective and has significant monetary-easing effects on the real ...
Working Paper
Quantifying Forward Guidance and Yield Curve Control
This study evaluates the effectiveness of Japan's unconventional monetary policies over the past quarter century within a unified term structure framework. It specifically examines the impact of the Bank of Japan's (BOJ) outcome-based forward guidance and yield curve control (YCC) and incorporates other policy types into the framework. The findings show that the BOJ’s forward guidance and YCC have both had a significant impact on the shadow rate. Forward guidance accounted for most of the policy impact in the early stages of unconventional monetary policies and remained influential ...
Working Paper
Anchored to the Dot Plot: Central Bank Projections and Interest Rate Expectations
In January 2012, the Federal Reserve began publishing the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) "dot plot," revealing FOMC participants' projections for the federal funds rate. This paper documents a dual role for SEP projections in the formation of private interest-rate expectations. On one hand, SEP projections contain valuable information, achieving lower forecast errors than consensus surveys, VAR models, and several market-based measures at many horizons. Because the SEP is informative, some reliance on it by private forecasters is natural. On the other hand, because the SEP is updated ...
Working Paper
Stock Market Fluctuations and the Term Structure
This paper uses the term structure of interest rates to explain the variations of stock prices and stock returns. It shows that interest rates have an important impact on stock returns, especially at long horizons. The hypothesis that expected stock returns move one-for-one with ex ante interest rates, which has been rejected strongly in other studies using short horizon data, is supported by long horizon data. The paper proposes, for the first time, a single measure---the present value of forward interest rates---to summarize the information of the term structure that is useful in ...
Working Paper
What Are Empirical Monetary Policy Shocks? Estimating the Term Structure of Policy News
Empirical monetary policy shocks (EMPS) mix information about both current andfuture policy. Policy news shocks at different horizons have different macroeconomic effects, so quantifying this mix is essential to use EMPS to evaluate theory. To disentanglethese shocks, we develop an IV method to estimate the term structure of monetary policy news, which captures how an EMPS affects policy residuals at each future horizon.Applying our method to popular monetary policy shocks, we learn that they do not represent textbook surprises Instead, they mix information about policy at many horizons,and ...
Report
The term structure of the price of variance risk
We empirically investigate the term structure of variance risk pricing and how it varies over time. We estimate the aversion to variance risk in a stochastic-volatility option pricing model separately for options of different maturities and find that variance risk pricing decreases in absolute value with maturity but remains significantly different from zero up to the nine-month horizon. We find consistent non-parametric results using estimates from Sharpe ratios of delta-neutral straddles. We further show that the term structure is downward sloping both during normal times and in times of ...