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Report
An index of Treasury Market liquidity: 1991-2017
Order book and transactions data from the U.S. Treasury securities market are used to calculate daily measures of bid-ask spreads, depth, and price impact for a twenty-six-year sample period (1991-2017). From these measures, a daily index of Treasury market liquidity is constructed, reflecting the fact that the varying measures capture different aspects of market liquidity. The liquidity index is then correlated with various metrics of funding liquidity, volatility, and macroeconomic conditions. The liquidity index points to poor liquidity during the 2007-09 financial crisis and around the ...
Report
Global variance term premia and intermediary risk appetite
Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected variances and term premia. Empirically, we document a strong global factor structure in variance term premia across the U.S., U.K., Europe, and Japan. We further show that variance term premia are negatively correlated with the risk appetite of hedge funds, broker-dealers, and mutual funds. Our results ...
Speech
Dinner address for the Bank of England-Federal Reserve Bank of New York Conference on Money Markets and Monetary Policy Implementation
Remarks at the Bank of England-Federal Reserve Bank of New York Conference on Money Markets and Monetary Policy Implementation, London, United Kingdom.
Working Paper
Economic Uncertainty before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic
We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the United States and the UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic policy uncertainty, twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective uncertainty about future business growth, and disagreement among professional forecasters about future gross domestic product growth. Three results emerge. First, all indicators show huge uncertainty jumps in reaction to the pandemic and its economic fallout. Indeed, most indicators reach their highest values on record. Second, peak ...
Speech
Transcript of the Cornell College of Business Annual New York City Predictions Event: February 15, 2017
Transcript of the Cornell College of Business Annual New York City Predictions Event: February 15, 2017.
Working Paper
An Empirical Analysis of Futures Margin Changes: Determinants and Policy Implications
Margin regulation raises two policy concerns. First, an alignment of margins to volatility can amplify procyclicality, leading to a build-up of excess leverage in good times and a forced deleverage in bad times. Second, competition among central counterparties (CCPs) can result in lower margin levels in order to attract more trading volume, which is referred to as a "race to the bottom." Motivated by these issues, we empirically analyze the determinants of margin changes by using a data set of various futures margins from Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group. We first find that CME Group ...
Report
Nonlinearity and flight to safety in the risk-return trade-off for stocks and bonds
We document a highly significant, strongly nonlinear dependence of stock and bond returns on past equity market volatility as measured by the VIX. We propose a new estimator for the shape of the nonlinear forecasting relationship that exploits additional variation in the cross section of returns. The nonlinearities are mirror images for stocks and bonds, revealing flight to safety: expected returns increase for stocks when volatility increases from moderate to high levels, while they decline for Treasury securities. These findings provide support for dynamic asset pricing theories where the ...
Working Paper
No-Arbitrage Priors, Drifting Volatilities, and the Term Structure of Interest Rates
We derive a Bayesian prior from a no-arbitrage affine term structure model and use it to estimate the coefficients of a vector autoregression of a panel of government bond yields, specifying a common time-varying volatility for the disturbances. Results based on US data show that this method improves the precision of both point and density forecasts of the term structure of government bond yields, compared to a fully fledged term structure model with time-varying volatility and to a no-change random walk forecast. Further analysis reveals that the approach might work better than an exact term ...
Discussion Paper
Risk Aversion, Global Asset Prices, and Fed Tightening Signals
The global sell-off last May of emerging market equities and currencies of countries with high interest rates (“carry-trade” currencies) has been attributed to changes in the outlook for U.S. monetary policy, since the sell-off took place immediately following Chairman Bernanke’s May 22 comments concerning the future of the Fed’s asset purchase programs. In this post, we look back at global asset market developments over the past summer, and measure how changes in global risk aversion affected the values of carry-trade currencies and emerging market equities between May and September ...
Report
The Law of One Price in Equity Volatility Markets
This paper documents law of one price violations in equity volatility markets. While tightly linked by no-arbitrage restrictions, the prices of VIX futures exhibit significant deviations relative to their option-implied upper bounds. Static arbitrage opportunities occur when the prices of VIX futures violate their bounds. The deviations widen during periods of market stress and predict the returns of VIX futures. A relative value trading strategy based on the deviation measure earns a large Sharpe ratio and economically significant alpha-to-margin. There is evidence that systematic risk and ...