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Working Paper
The high-frequency impact of news on long-term yields and forward rates: Is it real?
This paper uses high-frequency intradaily data to estimate the effects of macroeconomic news announcements on yields and forward rates on nominal and index-linked bonds, and on inflation compensation. To our knowledge, it is the first study in the macro announcements literature to use intradaily real yield data, which allow us to parse the effects of news announcements on real rates and inflation compensation far more precisely than we can using daily data. Long-term nominal yields and forward rates are very sensitive to macroeconomic news announcements. We find that inflation compensation is ...
Working Paper
Testing the expectations hypothesis when interest rates are near integrated
Nominal interest rates are unlikely to be generated by unit-root processes. Using data on short and long interest rates from eight developed and six emerging economies, we test the expectations hypothesis using cointegration methods under the assumption that interest rates are near integrated. If the null hypothesis of no cointegration is rejected, we then test whether the estimated cointegrating vector is consistent with that suggested by the expectations hypothesis. The results show support for cointegration in ten of the fourteen countries we consider, and the cointegrating vector is ...
Working Paper
The rise and fall of U.S. inflation persistence
This paper estimates the path of inflation persistence in the United States over the last 50 years and draws implications about the evolution of the Federal Reserve's monetary-policy preferences. Standard models of central-bank optimization predict persistent inflation outcomes. Time variation of the central bank's preference for output stability should be reflected in changes in inflation persistence. We estimate an ARMA(1,q) model with a time-varying autoregressive parameter for monthly U.S. inflation data from 1955 to 2006. The coefficients provide an estimate of the inflation target and ...
Working Paper
Lowering the anchor: how the Bank of England's inflation-targeting policies have shaped inflation expectations and perceptions of inflation risk
Inflation targeting as practiced by the Bank of England has undergone several changes since its adoption in 1992, including redefinition of the goal, measures to increase transparency and the granting of independence to the central bank. These changes are likely to have affected long-run inflation expectations and perceptions of future inflation risk. To that end, this paper estimates a no-arbitrage, affine, factor model of the term structure of inflation compensation in the United Kingdom. The model yields time series of expected inflation and inflation risk premia at short and long horizons ...
Working Paper
Are long-run inflation expectations anchored more firmly in the Euro area than in the United States?
This paper compares the recent evolution of long-run inflation expectations in the euro area and the United States, using evidence from financial markets and surveys of professional forecasters. Survey data indicate that long-run inflation expectations are reasonably well-anchored in both economies, but also reveal substantially greater dispersion across forecasters' long-horizon projections of U.S. inflation. Daily data on inflation swaps and nominal-indexed bond spreads--which gauge compensation for expected inflation and inflation risk--also suggest that long-run inflation expectations are ...
Working Paper
A closer look at the sensitivity puzzle: the sensitivity of expected future short rates and term premia to macroeconomic news
Nominal forward rates are sensitive at surprisingly long horizons to macroeconomic news and monetary-policy surprises. This paper takes advantage of affine term-structure modelling to demonstrate that movements in term premia, not expected future short rates, account for most of the reaction of forward rates at long horizons. Specifically, term premia account for about three quarters of the reaction of nominal forward rates 10 to 15 years hence to the surprise component of numerous macroeconomic news announcements. This has strong implications for the interpretation of interest-rate ...
Working Paper
Rounding and the impact of news: a simple test of market rationality
Certain prominent scheduled macroeconomic news releases contain a rounded number on the first page of the release that is widely cited by newswires and the press and a more precise number in the text of the release. The whole release comes out at once. We propose a simple test of whether markets are paying attention to the rounded or unrounded numbers by studying the high-frequency market reaction to such news announcements. In the case of inflation releases, we find evidence that markets systematically ignore some of the information in the unrounded number. This is most pronounced for core ...