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Journal Article
No volatility, no forecasting power for the term spread
Journal Article
Taming the long-term spreads
Given the size of the underlying markets, cutting the cost of capital to firms and households by reducing the yields required on long-term corporate bonds and mortgages is a key policy objective.
Working Paper
Small caps in international equity portfolios: the effects of variance risk
We show that predictable covariances between means and variances of stock returns may have a first order effect on portfolio composition. In an international asset menu that includes both European and North American small capitalization equity indices, we find that a three-state, heteroskedastic regime switching VAR model is required to provide a good fit to weekly return data and to accurately predict the dynamics in the joint density of returns. As a result of the non-linear dynamic features revealed by the data, small cap portfolios become riskier in bear markets, i.e. display negative ...
Working Paper
Term structure of risk under alternative econometric specifications
This paper characterizes the term structure of risk measures such as Value at Risk (VaR) and expected shortfall under different econometric approaches including multivariate regime switching, GARCH-in-mean models with student-t errors, two-component GARCH models and a non-parametric bootstrap. We show how to derive the risk measures for each of these models and document large variations in term structures across econometric specifications. An out-of-sample forecasting experiment applied to stock, bond and cash portfolios suggests that the best model is asset- and horizon specific but that the ...
Working Paper
The economic effects of violent conflict: evidence from asset market reactions
This paper studies the effects of conflict onset on asset markets applying the event study methodology. We consider a sample of 112 conflicts during the period 1974-2004 and find that a sizeable fraction of them had a significant impact on stock market indices and on major commodity prices. Furthermore, our results suggest that we are more likely to see investor reactions in response to conflicts that occur in highly polarized settings, possibly because the expected duration and intensity of the conflict is higher.
Working Paper
Are the dynamic linkages between the macroeconomy and asset prices time-varying?
We estimate a number of multivariate regime switching VAR models on a long monthly data set for eight variables that include excess stock and bond returns, the real T-bill yield, predictors used in the finance literature (default spread and the dividend yield), and three macroeconomic variables (inflation, real industrial production growth, and a measure of real money growth). Heteroskedasticity may be accounted for by making the covariance matrix a function of the regime. We find evidence of four regimes and of time-varying covariances. We provide evidence that the best in-sample fit is ...
Working Paper
A Bayesian multi-factor model of instability in prices and quantities of risk in U.S. financial markets
This paper analyzes the empirical performance of two alternative ways in which multi-factor models with time-varying risk exposures and premia may be estimated. The first method echoes the seminal two-pass approach advocated by Fama and MacBeth (1973). The second approach extends previous work by Ouysse and Kohn (2010) and is based on a Bayesian approach to modelling the latent process followed by risk exposures and idiosynchratic volatility. Our application to monthly, 1979-2008 U.S. data for stock, bond, and publicly traded real estate returns shows that the classical, two-stage approach ...
Working Paper
Home bias and high turnover in an overlapping generations model with learning
This paper develops a two-country OLG model under the assumption that investors are on a Bayesian learning path. While investors from both countries receive identical information flows, domestic investors start off with less precise prior beliefs concerning foreign fundamentals. On a learning path, differences in beliefs and estimation risk generate portfolio biases similar to those observed empirically: home bias in equity portfolios and trend-chasing in international flows. In addition, due to the higher volatility of the estimates of foreign state variables, our model produces excessive ...
Working Paper
Predictable dynamics in the S&P 500 index options implied volatility surface
One key stylized fact in the empirical option pricing literature is the existence of an implied volatility surface (IVS). The usual approach consists of fitting a linear model linking the implied volatility to the time to maturity and the moneyness, for each cross section of options data. However, recent empirical evidence suggests that the parameters characterizing the IVS change over time. In this paper we study whether the resulting predictability patterns in the IVS coefficients may be exploited in practice. We propose a two-stage approach to modeling and forecasting the S&P 500 index ...
Working Paper
Time and risk diversification in real estate investments: assessing the ex post economic value
Welfare gains to long-horizon investors may derive from time diversification that exploits non-zero intertemporal return correlations associated with predictable returns. Real estate may thus become more desirable if its returns are negatively serially correlated. While it could be important for long horizon investors, time diversification has been mostly investigated in asset menus without real estate and focusing on in-sample experiments. This paper evaluates ex post, out-of-sample gains from diversification when E-REITs belong to the investment opportunity set. We find that diversification ...