Browsing by Author "Wright, J. H."

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Open Access
Identification and inference using event studies
(Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013) Gürkaynak, R. S.; Wright, J. H.
We discuss the use of event studies in macroeconomics and finance, arguing that many important macro-finance questions can only be answered using event studies with high-frequency financial market data. We provide a broad picture of the use of event studies, along with their limitations. As examples, we study financial markets' responses to specific events that help address questions such as the slope of bond demand functions and the efficacy of central bank liquidity programs. We also study the change in financial market responses to news in payrolls and unemployment in response to former Fed Chairman Greenspan's statement that payrolls are more informative. Copyright © 2013.
Open Access
Macroeconomics and the term structure
(American Economic Association, 2012) Gürkaynak, R. S.; Wright, J. H.
This paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. The topic is important to investors and also to policymakers, who wish to extract macroeconomic expectations from longer-term interest rates, and take actions to influence those rates. The simplest model of the term structure is the expectations hypothesis, which posits that long-term interest rates are expectations of future average short-term rates. In this paper, we show that many features of the configuration of interest rates are puzzling from the perspective of the expectations hypothesis. We review models that explain these anomalies using time-varying risk premia. Although the quest for the fundamental macroeconomic explanations of these risk premia is ongoing, inflation uncertainty seems to play a large role. Finally, while modern finance theory prices bonds and other assets in a single unified framework, we also consider an earlier approach based on segmented markets. Market segmentation seems important to understand the term structure of interest rates during the recent financial crisis.
Open Access
Missing events in event studies: Identifying the effects of partially measured news surprises
(American Economic Association, 2020) Gürkaynak, Refet S.; Kısacıkoğlu, Burçin; Wright, J. H.
Macroeconomic news announcements are elaborate and multi-dimensional. We consider a framework in which jumps in asset prices around macroeconomic news and monetary policy announcements reflect both the response to observed surprises in headline numbers and latent factors, reflecting other details of the release. The details of the non-headline news, for which there are no expectations surveys, are unobservable to the econometrician, but nonetheless elicit a market response. We estimate the model by the Kalman filter, which essentially combines OLS- and heteroscedasticity-based event study estimators in one step, showing that those methods are better thought of as complements rather than substitutes. The inclusion of a single latent factor greatly improves our ability to explain asset price movements around announcements.
Open Access
The TIPS yield curve and inflation compensation
(American Economic Association, 2010) Gürkaynak, R. S.; Sack, B.; Wright, J. H.
For over ten years, the Treasury has issued index-linked debt. This paper describes the methodology for fitting a smoothed yield curve to these securities that is used at the Federal Reserve Board every day, and makes the estimates public. Comparison with the corresponding nominal yield curve allows measures of inflation compensation to be computed. We discuss the interpretation of inflation compensation, and provide evidence that it is not a pure measure of inflation expectations being distorted by inflation risk premium and liquidity premium components. We attempt to estimate the TIPS liquidity premium and to extract underlying inflation expectations. (JEL E31, E43, H63)
Open Access
The U.S. Treasury yield curve: 1961 to the present
(Elsevier BV, 2007) Gürkaynak, R. S.; Sack, B.; Wright, J. H.
The discount function, which determines the value of all future nominal payments, is the most basic building block of finance and is usually inferred from the Treasury yield curve. It is therefore surprising that researchers and practitioners do not have available to them a long history of high-frequency yield curve estimates. This paper fills that void by making public the Treasury yield curve estimates of the Federal Reserve Board at a daily frequency from 1961 to the present. We use a well-known and simple smoothing method that is shown to fit the data very well. The resulting estimates can be used to compute yields or forward rates for any horizon. We hope that the data, which are posted on the website http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2006 and which will be updated quarterly, will provide a benchmark yield curve that will be useful to applied economists. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.