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Report
Fundamental Disagreement about Monetary Policy and the Term Structure of Interest Rates
Using a unique data set of individual professional forecasts, we document disagreement about the future path of monetary policy, particularly at longer horizons. The stark differences in short rate forecasts imply strong disagreement about the risk-return trade-off of longer-term bonds. Longer-horizon short rate disagreement co-moves with term premiums. We estimate an affine term structure model in which investors hold heterogeneous beliefs about the long-run level of rates. Our model fits Treasury yields and the short rate paths predicted by different groups of investors and thus matches the ...
Report
The Term Structure of Expectations
Economic theory predicts that intertemporal decisions depend critically on expectations about future outcomes. Using the universe of professional survey forecasts for the United States, we document the behavior of the entire term structure of expectations for output growth, inflation, and the policy rate. We show that a simple unobserved components model of the trend and cycle explains the joint behavior of both consensus measures of expectations and the observed disagreement among individual forecasters. Importantly, univariate models of each variable are outperformed by a multivariate model ...
Discussion Paper
The Recent Bond Market Selloff in Historical Perspective
Long-term Treasury yields have risen sharply in recent months. The yield on the most recently issued ten-year note, for example, rose from 1.63 percent on May 2 to 2.74 percent on July 5, reaching its highest level since July 2011. Increasing yields result in realized or mark-to-market losses for fixed-income investors. In this post, we put these losses in historical perspective and investigate whether the yield changes are better explained by expectations of higher short-term rates in the future or by investors demanding greater compensation for holding long-term Treasuries.
Report
The term structure of expectations and bond yields
Bond yields can be decomposed into expected short rates and term premiums. We directly measure the former using all available U.S. professional forecasts and obtain the latter as the difference between bond yields and survey-based expected short rates. While the behavior of nominal and real short rate expectations is consistent with standard macroeconomic theory, term premiums account for the bulk of the cross-sectional and time series variation in yields. They also largely explain the yield curve's reaction to a host of structural economic shocks. This dramatic failure of the expectations ...
Discussion Paper
Forecasting Interest Rates over the Long Run
In a previous post, we showed how market rates on U.S. Treasuries violate the expectations hypothesis because of time-varying risk premia. In this post, we provide evidence that term structure models have outperformed direct market-based measures in forecasting interest rates. This suggests that term structure models can play a role in long-run planning for public policy objectives such as assessing the viability of Social Security.
Working Paper
Evaluating Asset-Market Effects of Unconventional Monetary Policy: A Cross-Country Comparison
This paper examines the effects of unconventional monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, European Central Bank and Bank of Japan on bond yields, stock prices and exchange rates. We use common methodologies for the four central banks, with daily and intradaily asset price data. We emphasize the use of intradaily data to identify the causal effect of monetary policy surprises. We find that these policies are effective in easing financial conditions when policy rates are stuck at the zero lower bound, apparently largely by reducing term premia.
Journal Article
Are Banks Exposed to Interest Rate Risk?
While banks seem to face inherent risk from short-term interest rate changes, in practice they structure their balance sheets to avoid exposure to such risk. Nonetheless, recent research finds that banks cannot offload all of the interest rate risk they are naturally exposed to. Historically, banks’ profit margins reflect their compensation for taking on interest rate risk and their stock prices are highly sensitive to changes in interest rates. These findings can help practitioners assess banks’ risk exposures and may have implications for unconventional monetary policy.
Discussion Paper
Discounting the Long-Run
Expectations about the path of interest rates matter for many economic decisions. Three sources for obtaining information about such expectations are available. The first is extrapolation from historical data. The second consists of surveys of expectations. The third are expectations drawn from financial market prices, often referred to as market expectations. The last are usually considered to be model-based expectations, because, generally, a model is needed to reliably extract expectations from current prices. In this post, we explain the need for and usage of term structure models for ...