Search

In the backdrop of adoption of inflation targeting framework, this paper computes optimal monetary policy rules for India conditional upon a small model of the economy covering the period 2000–2014. Weights to policy rules are developed by minimizing alterative inter-temporal loss functions defined over the variance of inflation, output and policy instrument from their respective targets. An optimal policy rule with the ratio of weight on output gap to inflation gap higher than in the standard Taylor rule and a flexible inflation targeting framework turns out to be welfare maximising for India. Lower interest rate smoothing or quicker monetary policy responses than estimated from the past data may be warranted to increase society’s welfare. While a policy rate in the range of 6.25–6.70 appears to be best suited under the macroeconomic situation prevailing during 2015–16, rates lower than 6.25% would lie outside the policy efficiency frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to develop a parsimonious model to explain and forecast bank loans to nonfinancial companies during calm periods as well as in situations of financial turmoil. It focuses on the French context, over a period including financial, banking and sovereign debt crises. Theoretical views and intuitions led us to gauge the marginal informational content of a large set of leading indicators in VAR and VECM models, and to investigate potential nonlinearity in credit dynamics. In accordance with firms and banks’ balance sheet effects, the growth rate of equity prices appears to be one of the most interesting leading indicator as well as a significant threshold variable for explaining regime switching. However, it appears difficult to accurately predict the right credit dynamics regimes. A simple VAR model finally performs better. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a no-arbitrage yield-curve model that explicitly incorporates the central-bank policy rate. This model is consistent with the existence of a lower bound for nominal interest rates, which makes it particularly relevant in the current context of extremely low interest rates. Changes in the policy rates depend on the monetary-policy phase, that can be either in an easing, status quo or tightening mode. The estimation of the model, based on daily euro-area yield data, reveals the strong influence of the monetary-policy phases on the shape of the yield curve. This relationship can, in turn, be exploited to estimate the probabilities of being in the different monetary-policy phases. The model is also used to compute term premiums, that are the parts of the yields reflecting the aversion of investors to interest rate risk. The results point to the existence of statistically significant premiums for many dates, even for short horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of political uncertainty caused by the civil uprisings, (the Tunisian Revolution) on the behavior and characteristics of Tunisian stock market cycles over time varying. This paper aims to apply the methodology of univariate structural unobserved components time series models to extract cycle and trend components. Our analysis showed that political uncertainty seems to generate unstable financial markets and more pronounced stock market cycles. The shock of the Tunisian revolution is very intense but temporary, and leads to a deviation of the trend from its original path. Indeed, during the period following civil uprisings, the amplitude and volatility of Tunisian stock market cycles have increased dramatically. But in the long term, the amplitude and volatility of stock cycles are amortized to achieve low. Overall, the findings are important in understanding the role of political uncertainty on stock market stability and are of great significance to investors and market regulators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, it is tried to propose a robust model for predicting inflation in Iran among alternative models. For doing this, monthly data from April 1990 to the end of September 2009 is used. Firstly, it is tried to determine whether the CPI data is chaotic or stochastic. It is shown that it is chaotic rather than stochastic. Therefore, it is predictable. Then, a stochastic differential equation model is estimated (specifically a geometric Brownian motion) for CPI in Iran. In order to compare the prediction power of the model other alternative models of prediction like ARMA, non-linear GARCH, EGARCH, TGARCH are also used to extrapolate inflation during a six month prediction period. Based on RMSE, MAE, U-Tail, it is revealed that stochastic differential equation model is much more robust than the alternative models mentioned above.

Since China's enactment of the Reform and Opening-Up policy in 1978, China has become one of the world's fastest growing economies, with an annual GDP growth rate exceeding 10 % between 1978 and 2008. But in 2015, Chinese GDP grew at 7 %, the lowest rate in 5 years. Many corporations complain that the borrowing cost of capital is too high. This paper constructs Chinese Divisia monetary aggregates M1 and M2, and, for the first time, constructs the broader Chinese monetary aggregates, M3 and M4. Those broader aggregates have never before been constructed for China, either as simple-sum or Divisia. The results shed light on the current Chinese monetary situation and the increased borrowing cost of money. GDP data are published only quarterly and with a substantial lag, while many monetary and financial decisions are made at a higher frequency. GDP nowcasting can evaluate the current month's GDP growth rate, given the available economic data up to the point at which the nowcasting is conducted. Therefore, nowcasting GDP has become an increasingly important task for central banks. This paper nowcasts Chinese monthly GDP growth rate using a dynamic factor model, incorporating as indicators the Divisia monetary aggregate indexes, Divisia M1 and M2 along with additional information from a large panel of other relevant time series data. The results show that Divisia monetary aggregates contain more indicator information than the simple sum aggregates, and thereby help the factor model produce the best available nowcasting results. In addition, our results demonstrate that China's economy experienced a regime switch or structure break in 2012, which a Chow test confirmed the regime switch. Before and after the regime switch, the factor models performed differently. We conclude that different nowcasting models should be used during the two regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a new econometric methodology for performing stochastic model specification search (SMSS) in the vast model space of time-varying parameter vector autoregressions (VARs) with stochastic volatility and correlated state transitions. This is motivated by the concern of overfitting and the typically imprecise inference in these highly parameterized models. For each VAR coefficient, this new method automatically decides whether it is constant or time-varying. Moreover, it can be used to shrink an otherwise unrestricted time-varying parameter VAR to a stationary VAR, thus providing an easy way to (probabilistically) impose stationarity in time-varying parameter models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach with a topical application, where we investigate the dynamic effects of structural shocks in government spending on U.S. taxes and gross domestic product (GDP) during a period of very low interest rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main motivation for this paper is to introduce a novel hybrid method for the prediction of the directional movement of financial assets with an application to the ASE20 Greek stock index. Specifically, we use an alternative computational methodology named evolutionary support vector machine (ESVM) stock predictor for modeling and trading the ASE20 Greek stock index extending the universe of the examined inputs to include autoregressive inputs and moving averages of the ASE20 index and other four financial indices. The proposed hybrid method consists of a combination of genetic algorithms with support vector machines modified to uncover effective short-term trading models and overcome the limitations of existing methods. For comparison purposes, the trading performance of the ESVM stock predictor is benchmarked with four traditional strategies (a naïve strategy, a buy and hold strategy, a moving average convergence/divergence and an autoregressive moving average model), and a multilayer perceptron neural network model. As it turns out, the proposed methodology produces a higher trading performance, even during the financial crisis period, in terms of annualized return and information ratio, while providing information about the relationship between the ASE20 index and DAX30, NIKKEI225, FTSE100 and S&P500 indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to analyze the definition effect on prediction powers of Early Warning Systems (EWS), we construct an EWS model with 20 different crisis definitions. Furthermore, to analyze the probability threshold effect, we identify 11 different threshold levels and forecast the different versions of our model for each of those threshold levels. Our results show that crisis definitions and threshold choices significantly affect the prediction powers of the EWS models. To put it more explicitly, Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) Index based definition is shown to be a better predictor compared to depreciation based definition. Furthermore, EMP Index is found to give better results with higher standard deviation multiplier. Last but not least, it is empirically proven that 50 % threshold is the optimal level for EWS analyses as until that level the prediction powers of the models significantly increase but keep constant above it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capital market investors' capability to forecast the central bank interest rate is critical, since the latter serves as an anchor for many economic transactions. Financial-economics literature shows that the short-term forward rate is a crucial factor considered by investors in the expectation of central bank returns. Yet, it is unclear if the forward rate, a rather abstract measure, is a sufficient predictor-whether a more concrete variable, such as investors' crisis cycle perceptions, significantly adds explanatory power to the central bank rate expectations. We examine Israeli capital market forecasting of the short-term Central Bank of Israel interest rate, i.e., a 1-to-3-month horizon, during the period 1993-2008. Beyond extracting the forward rate, we create a proxy for crisis business cycle, using local and international capital market performance. This financial setting allows us to examine the Construal Level Theory, where the abstract variable is the forward rate, the concrete variable is the economic crisis, and the construal level is the horizon length. The findings strongly support Construal Level Theory. We show that the expected central bank rate's reliance on the abstract forward rate becomes more aggressive for longer periods. In addition, the significant positive impact of the economy's crisis cycle on the short-horizon expected federal fund diminishes in longer horizons. Hence, there is a forecasting substitution effect between the concrete economy crisis and the abstract forward rate in the psychological distance represented by the investment horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the dynamic Nielsen and Siegel interest rate model in forecasting Australian government bond yields. We compare a two-stage OLS estimation procedure to a more powerful and robust state-space framework estimated via a Kalman filter. We show that the one-step approach generates smaller forecast errors than the two-step procedure or a benchmark random walk model when forecasting the Australian government term structure across various horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In models of monetary policy, discretionary policymaking is typically constrained in its ability to manage public beliefs. However, when a policymaker possesses private information, policy actions serve as signals to the public about unobserved economic conditions and belief management becomes an integral part of optimal discretion policies. This article derives the optimal time-consistent policy for a general linear-quadratic setting. The optimal policy is illustrated in a simple New Keynesian model, where analytical solutions can be derived as well. In this model, imperfect information about the policymaker's output target leads to lower policy losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a three-equation New Keynesian model we find that incorporating an escape clause (EC) into forward guidance (FG) is welfare improving as it allows the monetary authority to avoid cases in which the cost of reduced flexibility is too high. The EC provides the central bank with another instrument (additional to the promised policy rate), the announced threshold. The greater the size of the recessionary shock the lower the optimal promised rate and the higher the optimal threshold (i.e. the higher the probability of delivering the promised rate). While FG with an EC is better than discretion for facing any zero-lower bound (ZLB) situation, unconditional FG performs better than discretion only in the most extremeof ZLB events. Furthermore, even for very large recessionary shocks it is not optimal to make unconditional promises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An estimated monetary policy VAR with 1993:IV-2008:III Euro data returns an insignificant response of inflation and a borderline significant reaction of the output gap to monetary policy shocks identified with the widely employed Cholesky restrictions. We replicate this evidence with a Monte Carlo exercise, in which the true responses of inflation and the output gap, according to an estimated DSGE model which we use as data-generating process, are negative. Consequently, insignificant macroeconomic reactions to policy shocks as documented by a small-scale Cholesky-VAR for the Euro area do not necessarily point to monetary policy neutrality. Differently, the Cholesky-VAR evidence may very well be due to false short-run zero-restrictions. A data-driven discussion on this reading of the drivers of our Cholesky-VAR impulse responses versus alternative interpretations such as omitted factors and structural breaks is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linearized Hamiltonian model is proposed to extend the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) Market Model (LMM). Firstly, we studied the Hamiltonian of LMM in the framework of quantum finance, and the nontrivial upper triangle form of LIBOR drift is derived. The linearized Hamiltonian is derived to improve the explanatory capability of the model for market data. Our approach uses one more parameter to explain the initial condition and the model can be used to calibrate LIBORs with extremely high accuracy. Furthermore, the market time index is required for applying the model to multi-LIBOR, and the results imply that the LIBOR future time lattice becomes shorter as one goes from near future to distant future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We propose a simple but effective estimation procedure to extract the level and the volatility dynamics of a latent macroeconomic factor from a panel of observable indicators. Our approach is based on a multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic exact factor model that can take into account the heteroskedasticity feature shown by most macroeconomic variables and relies on an iterated Kalman filter procedure. In simulations we show the unbiasedness of the proposed estimator and its superiority to different approaches introduced in the literature. Simulation results are confirmed in applications to real inflation data with the goal of forecasting long-term bond risk premia. Moreover, we find that the extracted level and conditional variance of the latent factor for inflation are strongly related to NBER business cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relationship between credit ratings and bond yield spreads of peripheral countries in the euro area (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) for the period 1995–2014. Since 2012, bond spreads of those countries have come down very fast, whereas credit ratings have hardly changed. Our results suggest that credit rating agencies have become more cautious and have changed their approach to assess credit risk of sovereigns, and that the impact of sovereign credit risk ratings on sovereign bond spreads has changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present study is to analyze empirically the significance of the monetarist explanation of inflation in Pakistan. After testing the data for stationarity, the method of least squares is used. Regression analysis shows slight effects of money supply on inflation while, by contrast, structural factors involving wheat, oil and import prices show more substantial effects. The effective control of inflation requires policy makers to smoothen the supply of food and to moderate import prices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our analysis sheds light on the issue of whether the monetary policy contributed to the recent housing boom and bust. We have estimated and analysed a model that allows a comparison between the actual policy and several alternative Taylor rules. When the Taylor rule path was computed using revised data and the deflator for the GDP, we found a notable impact on key housing market variables, supporting Taylor’s critique of the Fed policy. However, the bulk of our evidence suggests that the policy as it would have been conducted under our real-time Taylor rules would not have had any significant impact on the housing market variables. This conclusion is robust with regard to the price index used as well as the relative weights used on the inflation and output gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines several economic variables that represent either confidence in future economic conditions or the degree of risk/uncertainty about future conditions in order to determine which contain more information about future employment and output. Some of these variables are prices, while others are from surveys. Causality tests, historical decompositions within a VAR and out-of-sample forecasts are among the tools used. This article concludes that monthly stock returns contain much more information about future economic conditions than the other variables. The spread between Moody’s BAA and AAA bonds, the spread between the constant maturity 10-year government bond and the federal funds rate, as well as uncertainty in future economic conditions as measured by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Business Outlook Survey also provide information about future economic conditions. Notably, this article finds that monthly stock returns contain more information about future economic conditions than does thevixand that variables based on market prices provide more information than survey data. This result provides some support for the notion that market prices aggregate information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistent with the credit channel theory of monetary policy transmission, this paper finds novel evidence that asset market liquidity as one of the proxies for the external finance premium explains bank liquidity creation. While efficacy of monetary policy depends on how banks create liquidity, the existing literature does not find any conclusive evidence that monetary policy variables explain aggregate bank liquidity creation. We use both stock market and the Treasury bond market liquidity as proxies for asset market liquidity, and find that: (1) asset market liquidity and credit-spreads explain aggregate bank liquidity creation and liquidity creation of larger banks; (2) stock market liquidity rather than credit-spreads or the Treasury bond market liquidity has robust and higher impact on aggregate liquidity creation; (3) while stock market liquidity better explains off-balance sheet liquidity creation, the short-term off-the-run Treasury bond liquidity has higher impact on on-balance sheet liquidity creation; (4) the Federal funds rate as a proxy for monetary policy impacts liquidity creation of smaller banks more than it does liquidity creation of larger banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Payment system data are available with virtually no time lag and could therefore help in tracking the evolution of GDP in real time. Using data from the Spanish national system for retail payments, we compare the performance of GDP nowcasts against that of alternative indicators. The main result is that payment system data can make a significant contribution to nowcasting GDP and they can also improve the performance of simple models that are currently based only on purchasing managers indices (PMIs). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recognising human capital's central role in economic development, many countries in the Asia Pacific region have allocated significant resources to the development of their education sectors. However, despite growing policy concern over acute mismatches between qualification supply and qualification demand, few of these countries have national systems for generating and disseminating employment forecasts. In this paper, we outline a forecasting method that is parsimonious in its data requirements, making it suitable for the often data-constrained research environments of the Asia Pacific's developing economies. We apply the method to Vietnam, a rapidly growing transition economy. The method generates detailed labour market projections, while also making transparent the underlying macroeconomic, structural and policy shocks that determine the forecasts. A decomposition of forecast outcomes in terms of the individual contributions of these shocks facilitates transparency in forecasting, by clearly distinguishing and ranking factors responsible for generating each forecast outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The government yield curve is known for its ability to predict the future growth rate of the economy. Later studies showed that credit spreads can assist in predicting macroeconomic behaviour as well. We extend this notion by utilizing corporate yield curves and demonstrating that corporate yield curve spreads can predict future economic growth, the future state of the economy and stock market behaviour. In addition, our sample covers the most recent data available, and it also includes the crash year of 2008 and the recovery period following it. Our results reveal a trade-off effect between the government yield curve, which is a better predictor for long-term forecasting, and the corporate yield curves, which are better predictors for short-term predictions. In addition, we show that both the government and corporate yield curves are more effective in predicting negative rather than positive economic changes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates whether monetary-policy regime changes affect the success of forecasting inflation. The forecasting performances of some linear and nonlinear univariate models are analyzed for 14 different countries that have adopted inflation-targeting (IT) monetary regimes at some point in their economic history. The results show that forecasting performance is generally superior under an IT monetary regime compared to nonIT (NIT) periods. In more than half of the countries covered in this study, superior forecasting accuracy can be achieved in IT periods regardless of the model used. In contrast, among most of the remaining countries, the results remain ambiguous, and the evidence on the superiority of NIT is limited to very few countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of international current account imbalances has dominated the economic debate for several years and has been considered one of the main reasons for the turbulences in the world economy since 2007. Economic theory suggests that an economy cannot run persistent current account deficits without depleting its net foreign assets. Nevertheless, for most of the 2000s, the US net foreign liabilities grew at a rate below the one of the cumulative current account deficit. To investigate on the mechanisms that allow the USA to do so, this paper sets up a two-country DGE model with asymmetric liquidity constraints. The model will show that there is a permanent wealth transfer from the world to the USA. The unique position of the USA not only allows them to run persistent current account deficits, but also imposes a permanent decay on the American current account. As the issuer of the world key currency in an asymmetric world monetary system, the USA can make use of Seigniorage and valuation effects to be able to run a continuous current account deficit. These mechanisms work in favour of their net foreign bond holdings, but let their current account further deteriorate. The corresponding one-way capital flows were part of the distortions that laid the ground for the world financial crisis 2007-2009. Future will show if a multi polar world with several (regional) reserve currencies emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inflation forecasts are a key ingredient for monetary policy-making – especially in an inflation targeting country such as South Africa. Generally, a typical Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) only includes a core set of variables. As such, other variables, for example alternative measures of inflation that might be of interest to policy-makers, do not feature in the model. Given this, we implement a closed-economy New Keynesian DSGE model-based procedure which includes variables that do not explicitly appear in the model. We estimate such a model using an in-sample covering 1971Q2 to 1999Q4 and generate recursive forecasts over 2000Q1 to 2011Q4. The hybrid DSGE performs extremely well in forecasting inflation variables (both core and nonmodelled) in comparison with forecasts reported by other models such as AR(1). In addition, based on ex-ante forecasts over the period 2012Q1–2013Q4, we find that the DSGE model performs better than the AR(1) counterpart in forecasting actual GDP deflator inflation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the accuracy of Blue Chip forecasts of short- and long-term interest rates and country risk premiums for the Eurozone and six other industrial countries for 1999–2008. In so doing, we utilize comparable random walk forecasts as benchmarks. Consistent with the efficient market hypothesis, the long-term interest rate forecasts fail to outperform the random walk. Our findings on the accuracy of short-term interest rate forecasts are, however, mixed. Further results reveal that Blue Chip is more (less) accurate in predicting country risk premiums associated with short-term (long-term) interest rates. Such evidence is reasonable since the short-term country risk premiums contain only the perceived default risk, while the long-term risk premiums, in addition, can contain the perceived inflation and exchange rate differentials. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the forecasting performance of macroeconomic variables on housing returns and on the possible shifts of regimes in house price cycles. We motivate our empirical analysis based on a general equilibrium model, and use a Markov switching model to identify two regimes of housing returns: the high volatility (‘boom-bust’) regime and the low volatility (‘tranquil’) regime. Given US data–, we find that with a single-regime model inflation rate and federal funds rate perform better than other economic aggregates in predicting housing returns. Using the Markov switching model, inflation rate and the federal funds rate are the most consistent predictor for in-sample and out-of-sample forecast of the probability of the ‘boom-bust’ regime. The results imply that motives for inflation hedging and changes in monetary policy matter for the movements of future housing returns and the possible shifts of regimes in house price cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]